Jake Conner has spent the last three years fighting a war he never really believed in. As he returns to his Arkansas home -- his best friend in a makeshift coffin -- he wants nothing more than a life removed from the senselessness of war. Fruitful days on his farm with his sons Steven and Glen. Peaceful nights with his wife Sue beneath the quilt she made for him in the hope he would indeed one day return.
But life is neither its happiest moments nor its darkest days. It is a tapestry of scraps, like the quilt itself. And in the years that follow, the owners of that quilt will see life in all its fullness, for better or worse. It will shelter Steven in his final hours. It will comfort an adopted daughter in the aftermath of unspeakable tragedy.
From parent to child, generation to generation, Scraps will witness joy and sorrow, good and evil, and the people who experience it all. It will journey with Lucy and Glen from the remote soil of Arkansas to the burgeoning city of Dallas. It will accompany Rachel and experience wealth and society in Boston. It will travel with Mary and Jeremiah to Chicago and encounter violence and bloodshed.
And when it's needed most, it will find its way home once more to Sue, to say goodbye, before returning north again with her great granddaughter.
"Scraps" is a journey of love, loss and family spanning the years from the end of the Civil War through World War II. The manuscript ends with Scraps being sealed in an attic chest and forgotten for a while before being rediscovered and finding a new home.
*The quilt is never the focus of the stories, or scraps if you will, of the people's lives who come into contact with it.
*The inspiration and I guess you could say the "real" Scraps is a hope quilt my mother made for my father while he was flying 32 missions over Nazi Germany in WW II in a B-17 bomber.
