Picking Up the Threads of a Lost Quilt
During the spring that I turned 80, I decided to splurge and celebrate this milestone by going on an Iberian Peninsula river cruise. Just before I returned to my home on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, I received an email from a good friend and neighbour, Vera Algoet. She knows that I don’t “do Facebook.”
Vera had been checking things on her Facebook feed when she read an unexpected post that she knew involved me. It read: “About 20 years ago I bought a beautiful quilt at an antique show. I never found quite the right spot for it in my home, but kept it because it was so beautifully made, and clearly had an interesting background story. It was made for a boy named Richard Curtis Willmott who was born to missionary parents in Chungking in 1930. Each letter of the alphabet has a beautiful fabric illustration, including embroidery, about his birthplace (Chungking representing the letter C) and his Chinese name (Yuin representing the letter
