Mr. Ohio (the quilt)

last summer, i fell for a guy from my college. he was 6 foot tall, rugged, and the most tree-hugging libertarian man i'd ever met. he was burly, with an old-world manly name. he was funny, he was sweet, and he was historically-inclined. he made me laugh and he was always present in time. he still had an older iphone–i assume it was an iphone 6 or somewhere close. i though that was charming, especially for someone who's parents had sent him to art school to study animation. he was a teddy bear, and i was smitten.

we went on only one outing that i would consider a date: dinner on tybee island that he paid for, 1-2 beers each, and a walk barefoot by the water that ended in us laying down in the sand side-by-side until midnight. he took us both back to the city but didn't seem like he wanted the night to end. he was fun. i can count on one hand the amount of times he picked me up or i saw him outside of class, but i can still recall the sound of his laughter and way it felt when we hugged.

this was never a man whom i knew i was to marry. he did not have morals that aligned, nor did he have goals that would have allowed for the same direction for us to walk in. but there was so much potential.

he moved to iowa and i moved to arizona. we talked on the phone less than 5 times after that. it's been over a year now since i last saw him, and his memory still runs past in my mind occasionally.

it took me a while to get to this point. i had just moved to a new city and the taste of a new love had been ripped from my grip so suddenly. i would think of him every day as i went into work. i would wait for his call every 3 weeks to check in on where we were in life. i would look for any tinge of flirtation in his voice, but i don't think he knew how, or maybe he didn't want to flirt at all. i drove myself crazy thinking about it–reliving every memory we shared in my mind each night before falling asleep. i know my friends were sick of me replaying it, but he was all i thought about. so i got over it the only way i knew how: quilting.

Mr. Ohio, 2025. Cotton scraps.

i am a person who feels my emotions and feelings so deeply. this helps me eventually feel them all the way out and overcome them, but they also tend to consume me. i go mad living in the "what if." so when i am in dire need of getting over something (usually grieving a love that i deem lost) i have to quilt it. i diligently take my time quilting something that encapsulates that moment in my life, capturing a memory in fabric form & i almost always incorporate words. i make it a finished quilt and tuck it away in a drawer for months. this is my way to physically compartmentalize it. once the quilt is done, it's like that phase of my life has finished & i can go on living again. it's as if a piece of my soul that felt untied and untethered can finally find a place to ravel up again. months will go by and i will be find the piece again tuckered away in a drawer behind things i forgot i had and i will pull out that quilt and recall those memories, except this time, its with adoration rather than dismay. i can look back on those memories without bawling my eyes out, like i can now look back at this quilt which was born from such a time as that.

i originally found the main doily in the center that features what resembles a ceramic casserole dish in an antique store on camelback road in phoenix (that just so happens to no longer exist). it was one of my first finds when i first came out here as an intern. so much uncertainty lied in my body those months when i did not know if a full-time job would come, and so much certainty lied in my heart when i did not know when his next call would ring in, or if it ever would.

this doily reminded me of appalachia and how much i missed home. i spent nearly $80 at that first antique store trip. i tucked the doily deep somewhere in my doily stash and didn't know what i was going to do with it. eventually, i settled on this.

the fabric in this piece is entirely secondhand. the white floral fabric is cut from a thrifted bedsheet that i had used for various other projects. the fabric itself is turned backwards so the pattern can be shown slightly muted. the frame is made up of 3 sides of orange-red and one side of green floral. the orange-red fabric is scrap fabric from a linen button-up shirt that i had used to cut strips from for my american flag quilt i started last summer (that still sits in my to-do pile). i had thrifted this shirt many years prior and was glad to finally give it a new life. the green fabric on the bottom & the floral backing comes from the community bin of fabric from my scad fibers building where i had been a student.

i chose these colors & these motifs because of the reminders of appalachia & appalachian design. he had been from ohio & his family was from mississippi, so it was always intriguing to me to find someone to relate to on that part of my world. he wasn't southern, but he was so country, it hurt.

"i left my heart in savannah and you took it to cincinnati" is an excerpt of a poem i wrote on july 31, 2025 at 9:29pm. (you can find the full poem here.)

i look back on that poem and remember the girl that wrote that. she doesn't exist anymore, but instead she lives inside of me & she has brought me to this place in time. God healed that girl who was hurting & i turned that hurt into a quilt.

he went to ohio & didn't know a part of me was still sitting in the passenger side of his car.

so now i have this quilt.