Sisters outdoor quilt show

Quilted car

Hugo Cabret quilt

     The tiny high desert town of Sisters, Oregon stages an outdoor quilt show every July.  They close the main street, and volunteer  firefighters hang  quilts from walls and balconies throughout  the town.   Quilt lovers from all over the US and Canada swarm in, oohing and aahing and buying fabric.   Judy and I have longed to go to the show, but even the handicapped parking lot is a distance from the quilts, and Central Oregon can get very hot in summer.  This year the temperatures were due to remain in the 80s, and friends alerted us to a charter bus that would drop us off in the center of town.  So off we went.

My favorite

Fire lookout on Black Butte

    When Judy was a young surgical nurse in her thirties, she spent a lot of time in the Sisters area.   During the bus  ride, while the forests  we were passing through changed from Douglas fir to Ponderosa pine, she told me stories of her adventures.  It was a treat for me to get a few glimpses of Judy's life before we met. Here is one story:   Once Judy climbed Black Butte.  She was almost to the fire lookout at the summit of the mountain when a ranger told her to run.   She  had to race down the mountain just ahead of of a thunderstorm.
    There were over 1300 quilts displayed this year  in Sisters, and we wanted to see them all.   There were old- fashioned quilts and contemporary quilts and an Elvis quilt. There was giant quilted sphere and a quilted minivan.   There was a whole set of pieces inspired by the children's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret.  The coffee shop sponsored quilts from a women's co-operative in the coffee-growing region of Uganda. My favorite of all was a  traditional pieced quilt that hung outside of the Stitchin' Post fabric shop.  My mother would have loved that one.

Judy with equipment and mascot

Detail

    For this 38th annual festival,  the town was well set up to accommodate thousands of tourists, almost all of them middle -aged women.  There were water refill stations, folding chairs set up in every inch of shade, and plenty of bathrooms.  The Lutheran church sponsored a buffet lunch, and enterprising boys bicycled down the center of the street puling a  cooler with  bottled water for sale.  The easy chairs in  the quiet Paulina Springs bookstore provided us a respite when the sun and the crowds got to be too much.

Becky

    Judy brought three tanks of oxygen on the trip, and rolled them around the town on a walker.  A few weeks ago  our friend Roxy made two puppets to keep  Judy company when she is tethered to oxygen.  The puppets went along with us to Sisters.  Sweet Becky sipped iced tea with Judy, and read some picture books, and petted a few dogs.  But it is fierce fighter Bo, named for Queen Boudica the warrior queen, who has become  Judy's constant companion.
     We were quiet on the bus going back to Portland.  There was a woman with a strong Texas accent  sitting two rows ahead of us.  She talked non- stop during the three hour trip to Sisters.  By the time she had talked non-stop for the three hours back, I felt like I knew her life story.  I was no longer annoyed by her, but grateful for the entertainment during the long ride home.

Bo