Note* This is not a deathfic, but a character has died, thus creating the fic.
Handmade Memories
By Samik <samik982@yahoo.com>
“Hey, Dad! What’s this?” Laura Kent, the middle child of the Kent three, easily pulled a large wooden trunk from behind a few dust covered boxes. Laura had volunteered to aid her father in his weekend task of cleaning out the attic. It was a task that had been put off for years, which the state of the space made obvious.
Clark ran his fingers over the carved wood. “This was your Grandma Martha’s favorite trunk,” he told her. “She told me once that when I was five or so, and about Matt JR’s size, I used to like to hide in it, and one time, the latch caught and I got stuck.”
“I think my son would be too afraid of the dark in the trunk to get into it,” Laura laughed. “How long did it take Grandma Martha to find you?”
Clark smiled, remembering. “Not long. No more than ten minutes probably. She said I bawled so hard. And I never got back into that trunk again.” Clark undid the latches and peered inside. He relaxed onto the floor, pulling the trunk’s contents onto his lap. “What are your mother and brothers doing?” He didn’t take his eyes off his lap.
“Matt and both of Jon’s boys are watching television with Mom,” she said, x-raying through the floor. “Jon and Sam are playing video games in the den.”
Jon had followed the footsteps of his parents and joined the Daily Planet team soon after graduating from the university. Sam, who was 21, four years younger than Laura, was home from the university for the summer. Often, most of the family would congregate at the Kent brownstone at least one day on the weekend to be together.
“Gather them in the living room. I’ll be down in a minute, okay?” Laura set off to do as Clark asked, leaving him alone with the trunk. He didn’t attempt to stop the tears that fell as soon as Laura left the attic.
It was no secret that Clark missed Martha. They all did. Everyone she encountered was touched in some way. He took her death the hardest, not only because she had been his only remaining parent, but because it meant that all he had left of her was memories. He knew that he at least had those, but he preferred the real thing.
It took much coaxing from Laura to draw the boys out of the den away from their video game. Clark appeared in the living room greeted with curious expressions from the adult members of his family.
“Laura and I found something of Grandma Martha’s that I’d like to share with you.” Clark sat in the middle of the floor, and immediately his three grandsons scrambled off the couch to sit near him. He smiled, and hugged each one in turn, before addressing the rest of the family.
“My grandma Clark made this,” he said, spreading a large quilt over himself, his grandsons, and most of the floor, “when my mother was a little girl.” This drew his children and Lois from their seats in various places about the room. Lois sat down opposite Clark, Jon and Sam on either side of her, and Laura nearest Clark, pulling Matt into her lap.
His voice was soft. “I remember when she told me about this quilt. It was a time when I was wondering what I was, and where I came from.” He realized his grandsons were there, but he knew they weren’t old enough to understand what he was talking about. “Mom told me about what it was like when she was a girl, then pulled out the quilt and shared her memories with me.
“You see the red checkered squares?” He pointed to the squares in the corners. “The red checkered squares represent Grandma Clark and her three other siblings. When she and her siblings were younger, they didn’t have a lot of money, so Grandma Clark’s mother made all their clothes. It was cheaper to buy one ream of fabric rather than multiple shorter lengths, so everyone wore the same pattern.”
Clark was quiet for a minute. The adults waited for him to continue, but one of his grandsons was not as patient.
“What about this one, Granddad?” Jacob, Jon’s eight-year-old son, pointed at a simple white square with pinstripe brown and blue lines.
“That one,” Clark replied, squeezing Jacob in a one-armed hug, “was actually part of one of Grandpa Jonathon’s shirts. See, Grandma Martha and Grandpa Jonathon were friends when they were young. There was one day they were pretending to be Tarzan and Jane.” he winked at the adults, “Though, they weren’t courting at the time. Grandpa Jonathon underestimated how far he could lift his arms above his head,” Clark demonstrated, “and ripped the sleeves clean off his shirt.” Everyone smiled, the children laughed. “I think Mom was exaggerating.”
They sat in the living room and Clark told stories about his mother for the better part of an hour. By the time Clark had finished, Matt was asleep in Laura’s lap, James, Jon’s younger son, was asleep in Sam’s lap and Jacob dozed against his grandfather’s side.
Clark picked Jacob up, laid him on the couch, then folded the quilt. The rest of his family watched him silently. He took the quilt upstairs and laid it at the foot of his bed. Lois watched him from the doorway. Clark turned to her with tears in his eyes. She moved to him and hugged him tight.
“I miss her too, Clark.” He nodded against her hair. “But we have so many wonderful memories.” Through the open door, they could hear conversation downstairs.
Talking ceased when Lois and Clark reentered the living room, and they looked at their children expectantly. Sam was the first to speak.
“We’ve decided,” he said gesturing to Jon and Laura, “that we want to make a quilt.”
“We’d like to give Matt, Jacob and James the sense of history that you’ve given us.” Laura gently hugged her sleeping son, and looked to her father for approval.
He nodded. Jon was the last of the Kent children to speak. “Grandma Martha was an amazing woman. We just hope that our quilt will be half as good as the one Grandma Clark made for her.”
Lois was quick to reassure her son. “It will be good because of the love you put into it. That’s what quilting is all about, the love and the memories. And that’s what Martha left us. And that’s what you’re going to pass on.”
They resolved to, the three of them together, make a quilt for each of the children. The quilts would be specific to that child, but contain similar elements linking them to their grandparents, their parents, their parent’s siblings, and their cousins.
It would be a gift for a specific birthday, a birthday when their children would be old enough to appreciate their history and to have it mean something to them.
They would say it was a gift from their grandma Martha, because it was Martha who gave them the idea, and it was through Martha that they first realized the full extent of their history.
Fin.
