Here Today, Here Tomorrow

I was having coffee with some locals today and someone commented upon how quickly groups on the Point disappear. There are always a lot of high hopes for one leader with one good idea: raising money for a lighthouse for Lighthouse Park, rebuilding the pier, restoring the cannery, whatever. Followed by a brief plateau and a quick decline. It may have to do with the fact that people know each other here in a way that makes them feel awfully free to criticize one another in a way that wouldn't happen in a more urban environment where you see less of one another. It isn’t like a family, really, but the criticism sometimes can feel as if it were. Or it may be that the leaders never want to give up their leadership. I don’t know.

The quilters group has been in existence here for over ten years, with a string of accomplishments, more still on their plates, and a large amount of good will toward one another and from the community. The group started by making a large ‘Community Quilt’ that is now in the entry way of the Community Center (which houses the library and several large meeting rooms). That quilt, which is based upon photos of old buildings in Point Roberts (some still here, but most, not), hangs behind Plexiglas and everyone who lives here has seen it, I'd guess. It has 12 large blocks plus a large center medallion, and each one of the quilters made one of the blocks, while three or four of them also worked on different parts of the medallion. The original group included a few people who knew how to sew but had never made a quilt, so starting with a large pictorial block was something of a challenge. It was impressive, however, the way everyone rose to the challenge and, even at the end, spirits were pretty high.

Nevertheless, it has to be said that 3 or 4 people washed out pretty soon after that experience and if it had not been for a few new people coming in, the quilting group might have stopped right there, despite all the success of finishing the Community Quilt. The group at the beginning had 12 members and a decade later still has about 12 members, but only eight of them were in that original group. People are a little fluid in their lives, as some people go away for the winter or the spring or the summer, but we keep on meeting, more or less the 12 apostlettes of quilting, sans leader.

Since that initial quilt was hung, we have made a large lighthouse-themed quilt that was raffled for the now-lost project to get a lighthouse in Lighthouse Park; we have made a large, traditional, geometric-patterned raffle quilt to raise money for the food bank; we have made a smaller ‘Boat Quilt’ that hangs in the local health clinic (open 3 days a week and staffed by a nurse practitioner); we contributed an outdoor quilt made of colored tarp pieces to the transfer station (where the recycles and other trash are transferred to somewhere else); we made a bird quilt for the elementary school, grades k-3; we made four large quilts of each of the Seasons in Pt. Roberts, all of which hang in the Lutheran Church’s great hall; and we are currently working on two quilts for the local library’s walls. We’ve had several shows here of our work, including one in conjunction with the Historical Society, one at a local art gallery, and one as part of a summer Art Walk. The Historical Socety took the images of the Community Quilt and had notecards made which, for a number of years, were sold at a local gift/craft store. We’ve made our mark here, but it hasn’t always been easy just because of our ease with one another, I think.

In the beginning, the two of us with the most experience were generally allowed to make serious decisions about what quilts would get made and how they were to be constructed. But over time, everybody else has developed the skills and experience that make us all peers in that respect. In this small place, when there is no obvious task before a newly formed group, it’s not really enough to have leaders and a good idea; there have to be enough followers to make the group work. For long-term survival, though, the followers have to stay with the work. Then one day you look around and it’s a group of leaders. And you’ve been doing whatever you’ve been doing for a decade and are the best of friends and are perhaps a little too free with your criticism.