It’s a Small World

When I was eight years old my family spent eight months in the United States, and towards the end we all boarded a huge white station wagon, toured the Southwest, and ended up in Los Angeles. With three kids in tow who had been taken hiking the canyons, visiting pueblos and various National Parks, a visit to Disneyland was part of the program before we were scheduled to fly home. (It wasn’t as big then as it is now, from what I gather from the website.) 

 

And I LOVED the pavilion ‘It's a Small World’, 

 

and sang the song for years afterwards (we had bought the illustrated book with a blue plastic record). My parents must have suffered....

Just before this past Christmas I realized that I had never heard from SAQA during the Benefit Auction about my donated piece. I checked the SAQA store, and sure enough, there it was, my piece ‘Who Wins in the End?’ still waiting for a buyer.

 

I thought that 2022 might be the first time in all my years of SAQA membership and benefit auction donations that my piece might not find a new home. Kind of frustrating that was, indeed. But only a couple of days later I did receive the message that it had been sold after all – I wrote back to receive the contact information for the buyer – waited for a reply – then finally received the information and sent a thank-you message a few days later. I wrote in English although the first name looked to me like a German spelling.

I thanked her for buying it, and that I was happy it had found a new home in California, because I had spent time in Santa Barbara, and this gave me a new feeling of connection to the state. And a couple of minutes later I received an answer in German. She was thrilled to not only have a quilt of mine now, but a personal mail as well. And she told me that we were ‘connected’ in another way already - she had been told about me from the buyer of her parents’ house in northern Germany, for whom I had quilted a special quilt at some point (when I was still selling fabrics and trying to start being a commercial longarm quilter). That house, where he now lives, is not too far away from the town where my grandparents lived for many years and where I spent my childhood summers. It’s a small world after all.

And about time to think about the next Benefit Auction piece.There's a tradition to uphold by now.