The Small Blue Quilt on the Isolette

Marjorie Voss laid out the flannel on the long oak table at one-oh-four, weighted the corners with the four small river stones her granddaughter Emma brought back from Point Beach in the summer of 2009, and took the tin of common pins down from the second shelf above the ironing board.

Marjorie Lorraine Voss — Lincoln High class of 1965, University of Wisconsin–Green Bay '69 (elementary education, with a minor in home economics under a professor named Helen Krogstad whose small handwritten note about the quiet steadiness of women Marjorie still keeps folded inside the front of her 1968 Singer sewing manual on the second shelf of the built-in in the front room), second-grade teacher at Franklin Elementary on Reed Avenue from the September of 1971 until her retirement on the last Friday of May, 2013 — has been the anchor of the Wednesday-afternoon quilting circle in the back room of Trinity Lutheran Church on North Eighth Street in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, since the first Wednesday of April, 1974.

The circle started six weeks after Lisa Marie was born.

Lisa Marie Voss came on the twenty-second of February, 1974, at eleven-oh-nine at night, at twenty-nine weeks and four days, in the small delivery room on the third floor of Holy Family Memorial Hospital on South Tenth Street. She weighed two pounds and eleven ounces. She stayed on the neonatal unit on the fourth floor for seventy-three days.

On the fourth morning, a nurse Marjorie will remember by her married name — Dolores Kessler Wojciechowski — brought into the small windowless family room a hand-quilted crib-sized blanket in a soft yellow gingham binding, a gift from a woman in Two Rivers whose own son had been on the same unit in the winter of 1971, and laid it across the top of Lisa's isolette.

Marjorie kept the quilt.

Lisa Marie came home on the sixth of May, 1974, weighing four pounds and nine ounces, with the yellow gingham quilt folded across her lap in the plaid car-seat carrier her husband Karl had ordered from the Sears catalog in the March.

On the first Wednesday of April, the following spring, Marjorie called Ruth Ann Lemke, Eleanor Peshek, and Marion Halvorsen — three women from her Trinity Lutheran Ladies' Aid circle — and asked whether they might be willing to spend a Wednesday afternoon in the back room sewing a small blue crib-sized quilt for the next mother the fourth floor was going to send home too early.

They said yes.

They have been saying yes on the first Wednesday of April, and every Wednesday after, for fifty-one years.

What the notebook on the shelf knows

Marjorie has been keeping a small maroon composition notebook on the shelf above the ironing board since the second Wednesday of April, 1974.

On the front cover, in her own round hand, in the same blue Papermate ink she wrote her second-grade report-card comments in for forty-two years, are the words Small Blankets — Trinity Ladies' Aid — for the 4th floor.

Inside, one line per quilt, running now to the middle of the third notebook — a maroon Mead composition book she started on a Wednesday in the June of 2014 — are the small careful entries of every crib-sized quilt the circle has ever finished.

4/17/74 — first blanket — soft blue with white gingham binding — for the Bergstrom baby, room 412 — Dolores said thank you.

9/23/81 — blanket #197 — small yellow moons on navy — for the Krainz twins, unit 4A — the smaller one did not go home.

6/12/96 — blanket #614 — soft green with pastel elephants — for Emma Marie Voss, our granddaughter, seven pounds two ounces, born at Aurora BayCare, sent to Holy Family in the ambulance at four-oh-eight in the morning.

7/29/26 — blanket #3,142 — soft blue with a small white boat block Ruth Ann drew last winter — for the Nguyen baby, room 418 — his mother had walked in from the bus stop on North Ninth Street at eleven at night.

Thirty-one hundred and forty-two small blue crib-sized quilts have gone up the freight elevator at Holy Family Memorial since the seventeenth of April, 1974.

On the last page of the current notebook, in Marjorie's small careful hand, is a small list of the six women who now sit at the oak table with her — Ruth Ann Lemke, seventy-nine; Eleanor Peshek, eighty-one; Marion Halvorsen, seventy-eight; Barb Kubale, sixty-nine; Lorraine Schuette, seventy-two; and, since the second Wednesday of March, a young mother named Amanda Nguyen, thirty-four, whose own son Henry left the unit on the sixth of April.

Nobody at the hospital foundation, on the second floor of the office at 2300 South Tenth Street, has ever seen the notebook.

What the second-floor file says

On the second floor of the Holy Family Memorial Foundation office on South Tenth Street, on the same Wednesday afternoon at three-oh-two, the director of individual giving — a warm and diligent thirty-eight-year-old named Rebecca Ann Stollenwerk, hired in the September of 2023 from the development office at a small Catholic hospital foundation outside Green Bay — was opening the third-quarter sustaining-donor file on her laptop at a plain oak desk under the north window that faces the lake.

The line for Marjorie L. Voss came up on the eighty-seventh row down.

VOSS, MARJORIE L. — 1428 N. 12th St., Manitowoc WI 54220. Sustaining $40/mo since 06/1974. Initial gift $25 (5/1974, memorial line: for the nursing staff of the fourth floor). Mail only. Spouse: Karl W. Voss (deceased 3/2018). No engagement noted. Wealth screen: middle band. Do not upgrade.

Rebecca has never met Marjorie.

Rebecca has never opened the freight elevator on the ground floor of Holy Family Memorial on a Thursday morning at ten past nine, and watched Barb Kubale wheel a small canvas cart of seven crib-sized quilts up to the fourth floor.

Rebecca has never stood in the small windowless family room on the fourth floor, and watched a young mother from North Ninth Street lift a small blue quilt with a hand-drawn boat block off the top of an isolette and press it, for a long careful moment, against her chest.

The wealth screen has never opened the maroon composition notebook on the shelf above the ironing board at 1428 North Twelfth Street.

What twenty years of software has quietly missed

For twenty years, every honest hospital foundation in America has been buying — one annual contract at a time, at prices that would keep the Trinity Ladies' Aid quilting circle in Moda flannel for the next hundred and forty springs — tools that were built to answer the wrong question about Marjorie Voss.

The tools were built to answer: of our forty-six thousand donor records, which ones look most like the ones who wrote the largest checks last year?

Marjorie has not written a large check.

Marjorie has been writing a different kind of check — quietly, on the first Wednesday of April, and every Wednesday since, for fifty-one years — from the back room of a small Lutheran church on North Eighth Street. Her check is thirty-one hundred and forty-two small blue quilts, and one line, in blue Papermate ink, for each of them.

That is a different kind of check. It requires a different instrument.

The instrument that could see Marjorie is not a wealth screen. It is a small careful set of notes, assembled by someone who has spent a quiet Tuesday morning listening — to the Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter Ladies' Aid notice from the April of 1974, to the two small mentions of Trinity Ladies' Aid in the hospital's annual gratitude report for 1989 and 2004, to the parish bulletin from Trinity Lutheran that lists, on the first Sunday of every month, the Wednesday quilting circle — all welcome, no experience needed, coffee at one, to the small three-line note the Reporter ran on the twelfth of March, 2018, when Karl Voss died at seventy-four — and set them beside Marjorie's file, and hand them to Rebecca on a Monday morning at eight-fifty, before the third-quarter portfolio meeting.

The notes would say:

Voss, Marjorie L. Retired second-grade teacher, Franklin Elementary, 1971–2013. Widow of Karl W. Voss, deceased March 2018. Mother of Lisa Marie Voss, born prematurely at Holy Family February 1974 (73 days on the fourth-floor NICU). Founded the Trinity Lutheran Ladies' Aid Wednesday quilting circle in April 1974, six weeks after Lisa came home. The circle has, in the fifty-one years since, hand-quilted and delivered 3,142 crib-sized blankets to the neonatal unit at Holy Family. Marjorie keeps a maroon composition notebook of every blanket. Suggestion, this September: no ask. A handwritten letter from Dolores Kessler Wojciechowski, RN, retired, of the fourth-floor unit — thanking Marjorie, by name, for the fifty-one Aprils of Wednesday afternoons, and mentioning that the small yellow gingham blanket she laid on Lisa's isolette on the twenty-sixth of February, 1974, is the reason. Mail it from Two Rivers, not Manitowoc. Marjorie will fold it into the front of the 1968 Singer manual on the second shelf of the built-in in the front room, beside the small handwritten note from Helen Krogstad about the quiet steadiness of women.

Rebecca, on a Monday morning at eight-fifty, reads the notes. She looks at them for a long moment. She writes to Dolores that afternoon.

That is the whole product.

We are not the Wednesday afternoon

Rōmy is not, and cannot be, the Wednesday afternoon in the back room of Trinity Lutheran.

The oak table is Marjorie's. The four small river stones from Point Beach are Emma's. The tan Kenmore Marjorie has been oiling since 1974 is Marjorie's. The small blue quilt with the hand-drawn boat block Ruth Ann worked on all last winter is Ruth Ann's. The freight elevator at Holy Family Memorial belongs to Barb, on the second Thursday morning of every month, at ten past nine. The small maroon composition notebook on the shelf above the ironing board — the line reading 4/17/74 — first blanket — soft blue with white gingham binding — for the Bergstrom baby, room 412 — Dolores said thank you — is Marjorie's, and it will stay Marjorie's, and it is the whole gift, and the whole reason the three-thousand-one-hundred-and-forty-third small blue quilt will come up the freight elevator the second Thursday morning in September.

What a tool can do — quietly, on the second floor of an office on South Tenth Street on a Monday morning at eight-fifty, twenty minutes before Rebecca opens the CRM — is hand her the small careful page a good listener would have written if a good listener had been sitting on the metal folding chair in the corner of the back room on North Eighth Street, watching the tan Kenmore stitch.

That is a smaller job than the industry has been trying to sell for twenty years.

It is also, we think, with some love, the whole job.

A small assignment, with love

Walk into the small church in your service area this week. Not the big one on the highway, with the coffee bar and the drum kit and the projector screen. The other one. The one with the maple pews, the small cork bulletin board in the vestibule, and the mimeographed sheet taped to the door of the back room that reads, in someone's Wednesday hand, quilting circle — 1 p.m. — coffee's on.

Ask the woman at the sewing machine, when the room is quiet — after the second cup of coffee and before the small blue binding goes on — how long she has been coming.

Ask her, if she will tell you, where the quilts go.

Then, on Monday morning, before you open the CRM — before the mail-merge window suggests a forty-dollar-a-month sustainer on the eighty-seventh row down — pull down a plain notecard from the top drawer, and write, in your own hand, the two sentences a Wednesday-afternoon quilter would have written for you, if she were paid, in this life, to write them.

Sign it.

Mail it from your kitchen table on Saturday morning, so the postmark reads the small town on the lake your donor's granddaughter still keeps four river stones from.

The tan Kenmore is still on the oak table in the back room at Trinity.

The maroon notebook is still on the shelf above the ironing board.

Marjorie has been keeping the Wednesday afternoons since 1974. ♡