Fluff Counts: How my Mom Won the Family Quilt

Back in August, after returning from our family vacation that I didn't tell you about beforehand because I'm freaked out about weird internets robbing our house while we're away, I listed off a bunch of titles of blog posts that were to follow about our vacation. I don't think I made it past two of those posts. I forgot about them.

But my mom sent out her annual newsletter with her Christmas cards and we got ours in the mail today. She mentioned my humble little blog (hello referred family members!) and said she was looking forward to this blog post that I never got to. Well, Merry Christmas, mom.

Zoe helping Gramma in the kitchen at the reunion.

Here's how the family reunion went.

First of all, my family is kinda crazy (hello again, family!). But everybody's family is crazy, right? Getting married and having to explain it all to your (thankfully) love-struck, newly-wed husband casts a new light on the family craziness. I have to go back five years here. It began with registration at the 2003 family reunion, about three weeks after our first anniversary. "Registration?" my love questioned incredulously. "Heh, heh... You have to understand, there are like 200 people here. It's a big family." I tried to explain that this year was going to be more relaxed than previous years, but with little to compare it to, it makes no difference. No matter how you spin it, "registration" doesn't sound relaxed. So, these are the kinds of things that go on at this big family reunion (it only happens once every 5 years): there are various tournaments that people plan, like horse shoes, baseball if they can get enough people interested, bingo, Mission Impossible and bocce ball. This year, my aunt & cousin planned a horse race and people placed bets. The kids jockeyed the horses (hobby horses) and I thought it was brilliant. But I digress.

My dad and nephew participating in the sitting tournament.

In addition to the tournaments, games and gambling on children's races, there is a raffle. For a quilt. And not just any quilt, it is a handmade quilt. It is a handmade quilt with a family tree (of sorts) on it. For the first 20 years, my grandma made the quilt, but this year two of my aunts adopted the project. My mom saw preview pictures of the quilt and declared (to my sisters and I) that she was going to win it. She had set aside some money from a garage sale she'd held and her found money.

I guess this requires another story here: found money. As organizers of the reunion, my mom and her sisters field complaints from anyone in the family who feels the need to complain about the reunion, and after the last reunion, someone complained about the cost of the reunion. My family is very thrifty. They chose the location of the reunion based on it's free-ness, and I don't mean availability. It is a campground that is free. It's free to camp (you just have to get there before anyone else), and you can rent the kitchen and "bathrooms" (outhouses with a sink). So, it's pretty cheap. It's like $50 or something for our whole family for the weekend, which includes a few meals. Anyways, my aunts and mom were talking about the ridiculousness of the complaint about the cost of the reunion and someone said, "I find that much money in 5 years." So that became the challenge, mom and dad save all the money they find in a special place for the reunion. There are a few rules. You can't find it in your own house. My aunt couldn't find it at her theatre (too much to be fair). They allowed my dad to find it at his work because he cleans a school and there's maybe 35 cents a day or something.

Sisters, brother in law and nephew neither holding a garage sale nor finding any money.

So, mom took her garage sale money and her found money and probably some other money she had set aside and she planned to buy quilt raffle tickets. She gave me and my sisters and our kids some money to buy raffle tickets (or whatever, she said) for ourselves and then periodically throughout the weekend she gave us money to buy tickets for her. It was all on the down-low, though. We weren't supposed to tell anyone how many tickets mom was planning on buying. See, there aren't a lot of people with much money in our family. But there are a couple. And one guy has won a quilt (or two, now I can't remember) and he always buys a ton of tickets and wins. She knew that if people found out how many tickets she was planning to buy, that someone else would be able to buy more and they would buy more because they'd have to if they wanted to keep their chances high. She was also keeping tabs on how many tickets other people were buying.

My sister, clearly slacking on her ticket-buying duties.

By the end of the weekend, I don't even know how much money she spent on tickets and I think at the last minute she bought a hundred more or something, because she sure had a lot of tickets to look through when the draw came. Everyone knew how much my mom wanted the quilt. My mom has also done a lot of work for all of the reunions, even though she hasn't lived near where the reunions have been held for the past 20 years. She pretty much planned the first one herself (she must have had help, but I was 7, so I don't really remember these things). And my mom's awesome and everyone loves her because she's like the Alpha sister and doesn't get caught up in the petty squabbles and manages to remember what's really important about family and get everyone else sorted out, too. Anyway, when they pulled the ticket and called the number (I knew it wasn't mine because it was green and I had only bought red tickets), no one claimed that they had the ticket right away. But mom had some more tickets squirrelled away in her camper, so she ran to get them. And sure enough, when she returned, she emerged with the winning ticket. She was crying. Then we all started crying. It was so weird. I've never cried over a quilt or a raffle before and I don't plan to make a habit of it.

Simon, busking for raffle tickets.

And then mom said that the winning ticket was one of the first tickets she bought. She didn't need to buy all those other tickets. And I said, no, that's not true. The other tickets made the fluff of the tickets just right, so that ticket would be the one chosen, had there been more or fewer tickets purchased, it would have been different and who knows what would have happened then?

Sometimes I think about all the things in my life that I wish were different, things I wish I'd done differently, said differently. But all those things have made me into who I am. And while I'm not perfect, I'm the only me I know and I'm still striving to be a better person. And I believe that God has all things under control. And who knows, if it would have been different, who knows what would have happened then?