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under it the day before Q and I headed toward the Ouachita Mountains, and I offer now the possibility that its influence gravitated from turkey tracks to wandering feet.
    After we left the store atop Rich Mountain and I’d said something about memory and how the domino table was the first furnishing in my Ouachita room, she, whose interest in quilts goes beyond mere curiosity in
Q
things, said, “My memory is like a quilt, a crazy quilt. Happenings come back to me in recall so haphazardly.” As we drove toward a quiet spot in the forest to eat our sack lunch, she picked up the topic again. “My memory is a quilt wearing thin with time. It has holes in it.” She paused to reason her trope. “But if I don’t unfold it and spread it out and use it, the fabric itself begins to vanish.” She saw me writing down her words, and she said in a resonant voice as if she were onstage, “Eaten away by the moths of time.” And a mile farther along, she said, “By the way, there’s a boy in my family who slept many nights in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle sleeping-bag. Except for his martial-arts class, he’s growing up inside an invisible shell.”
    Several weeks later, looking in a book to verify the names I used for the design on my coverlet, she came across a couple of sentences in
Quilts in America:
“A pattern called ‘Wandering Foot’ was thought to convey wanderlust. As such, it was never used on a young person’s bed for fear he or she would travel west and never be heard from again; eventually the block was renamed ‘Turkey Tracks’ to break the jinx.” It’s a peculiar sensation to see one’s life reflecting folklore, even if it reverses, well, the pattern. For me, the design is an emblem of anyone’s quest for quoz, a graphic reminder of an ancient notion found in Asian thought:
Wandering can help restore one’s humanity and reestablish the harmony once existing between us and the cosmos.
I add that even if such harmony is only imagined, a longing for it can humanize.
    I’m indebted to my westering, quilting great-grandmother and to my unsuperstitious father — who taught me how to read both books and maps — for bedding me down under a welter of turkey tracks across a field of blue and for sending me out wandering westward and to every other point of the compass which he also taught me to read. So far, it’s been a pretty good life, pieced together as if a quilt, from books, maps, and an old puritanical jinx.

    Greene County, Missouri, 1940.

5
    A Planetary Washboard
    T HE OUACHITAS TOO HAVE WANDERING FEET  — around, up, down. That is to say they’ve been transported and translocated by plate tectonics, orogeny, and erosion, and those forces make them a fit metaphor for a human life and the way we’re born from a uterine sea, carried about until we become self-locomoting and find our elevation rising before sometime later we begin to see the erosions of time on our bodily substance.
    Four-hundred-million years ago, the Ouachitas were sediments. A hundred-million years later, having become shales and sandstones, yet still submerged on the globe far distant from where they are today, they began heading westerly on a collision course that would assist in raising them above the ocean. Once risen, they began moving back down again flinder by flinder toward the sea from whence they came, for nature aboveground seems to abhor a mountain or even a hill: wind and rain and gravity make certain all which rises will fall. Dame Nature is an acrophobe. On Rich Mountain — the name comes from pockets of fecund soil created out of the hard mountain by erosive elements — you can see one proof of that natural abhorrence for height in the so-called rock glaciers, massive swaths of sandstone boulders slipping down the mountain not tokus over teakettle but like a quilt drawn off a bed, sliding down as if pulled, as in fact they are.
    I should mention here a local notion that certain fertile basins on Rich