Once, I used to visit a much older woman. She would ask me if I’d like a cup of tea, then going to the cupboard, she would find that she had no tea. She would revise the offer, and say, “Would coffee do instead?” I’d say, “Sure.” Then, she would take note of the fact that she had no coffee. She would open the refrigerator door, in the hope of offering me a soft drink. No, her family would have consumed the last can of soda. Eventually, I’d settle for a glass of water, which, by the way, was fine with me.

She loved my mother’s cooking and would always ask for recipes, but not having a full “larder,” she’d make many substitutions that were not even reasonable ones. Then, she would bemoan the fact that her cooking was not as good as Betty’s. The problem reached the point that my mother no longer would share her recipes with the woman. They came out so awful, my mother did not want others to hold her responsible. No, we cannot substitute unlike substances and expect a recipe to come out right.

In life, details are important! Yet often, doctors do not pay enough attention to details and then we hear of a patient walking around with scissors accidentally sewn up inside him. Of course that is a drastic example. In medicine, though, weird situations happen all the time. A person is administered a drug that has some component to which he is allergic, or has the wrong limb amputated.

In old census records, we find all kinds of spelling errors related to names, places, and dates. It is really difficult to make sense of our ancestor’s lives, when a record or records are incorrect and also scant. If no birth record exists, as was often the case, it can be difficult to prove that a person is a certain age. This was true when my mother applied for Social Security and had no birth record from the town in Georgia where she was born. She ended up scurrying to find other records to help prove her age.

Cover image of e-book on CD about Ellen Webster, New Hampshire’s early quilt historian

The person about whom I wrote an extensive biography last year had been referred to as “Emily Webster” when her name was truly “real canadian superstore pharmacy.” Perhaps no other information ever would have been available, certainly not a 355 page manuscript with many family photos, like the one I wrote, had everyone continued to believe that the quilt historian’s name was “Emily.” Indeed, she did have a friend (not related to her) whose name was Emily Webster, but that is a longer story than I can recount here. Photos of Emily are in my e-book.

Yes, life is in the details. It is an easy lesson to learn when one cuts a long border of a quilt 1/4″ shorter than what it should be. Don’t ask me how I know! Minute matters matter! Here’s to all the other sticklers out there who care about getting their facts and their fractions right!

Patricia Cummings, author of real canadian superstore pharmacy (Quilter’s Muse Publications, Concord, NH, 2008) – an e-book on CD

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