EVERY DAY CAN BE A SPECIAL DAY OF SOME SORT

Other than commemorating events and important birthdays, I don't know how special weeks, days and months get on the calendar, in headlines, on agendas or whatever. We have National Pickle Week, Dairy Month, Oxtail Soup Day, etc. Does it take an act of Congress?

I have lots of personal special days which take no Congressional pros and cons. I do it by simple decree. It gives me a great sense of power such as the ancient kings of the Medes and Persians used to wield.

Last week I celebrated my Quilt and Afghan Airing Day. I stepped outside when the day promised to be blue and golden as most October days are. A secret combination of odors had been mixed and distilled in the dark of night and sprayed upon the morning air. I detected faint crushed acorns, a dash of leftover leaf smoke, drying grasses and chrysanthemum foliage. A brisk breeze was playing with the weathervane. It seemed appropriate to announce, "Whereas there is a right amount of wind and sunshine to fluff cotton, dacron, wool, shake out wrinkles and add inimitable fragrance, this will be Quilt and Afghan Airing Day."

A fiddling cricket seemed to agree and a ladybug, creeping along a porch post, seeking winter shelter, paused. If I had my magnifying glass I'm sure I would have seen her nod in acquiescence.

So out onto the clothesline went the lovely and lovely-named quilts: Log Cabin, Carpenter's Wheel, Lone Star, Tulip Basket, Rose Wreath, Signet Ring, Variegated Nine Patch, Kansas City Star Lost Pattern, Wedding Ring, etc. (I have two long clotheslines).

There was a time, before the Bradford Pear tree got so big that it obliterated the view from the street, when passersby, thinking a yard sale was underway, would stop to see the quilts and ask the price. When I told them they were priceless, not for sale, but only airing, to cover their slight embarrassment, they'd remark about the beauty of color combination, the fine stitching, maybe even sit down to have an offered cup of coffee and listen to me tell how each one of the quilts came into being. The history was short and to the point, but that was before I adept at and addicted to fiction.

Now, should that pear tree ever fall down and passersby could again see the display on my decreed Quilt and Afghan Airing Day, and stop to visit, I am much better prepared to tell the histories and lace such histories with little curlicued stories as delicate and fanciful as the snowflake quilting patterns embellishing some of the quilts.

I would start with the oldest, frayed, almost falling apart one, for it was my first quilt. Pointing to it with a handy picked-up pear tree stick, as one would with a pointer, I'd say, "This is the Broken Star design, pieced and set together in my youth and quilted by the good ladies of the Doe Run Church. As you can see, it is in tatters, for we didn't have blankets then. We had only quilts and they were washed and washed and washed, sometimes with lye soap.

"One night a particularly bright star fell from the heavens and landed in a cow pasture high on Simms Mountain in the Ozarks. Lots of the neighbors saw it fall Stacys, Britts, Alexanders, McFarlands and hunted for months afterwards for pieces of it. But I was the lucky one who found it. It happened when I was going after the cows one summer evening. Suddenly, coming out into this little clearing, I saw the pieces of brightly colored stones, which I recognized immediately as pieces of a broken star! They were arranged in this precise position." Here I would point to the six-pointed-star design of my quilt with the extra little diamond-shaped patches radiating out from the points.

When I would hear sniggers and see a suitable amount of nudges and rib pokings, I would turn to the Log Cabin quilt, saying, in Lincolnesque form, "I was born in a log cabin with a stick and mud fireplace. By the fireplace light I read~~~ hundreds of books which I walked miles and miles to borrow. This red patch in the middle of the block represents the fire. The light side of the patch, or these strips, represent the light from the fire, the dark strips represent~ that area in the cabin away from the light."

By this time there possibly would be sidelong ~looks from eyes and skeptical grins, plus a determination to hear me out while someone else possibly went for a press corps or a man in white. Maybe, to test my dramatic tendencies, there would be a few urgings here and there for me to get on with the Drunkards Path, the Tennessee Bluegrass Star or that Kansas City Star Lost Pattern.

Of course the stories would vary from year to year, but when Autumn pixies play ring-rosy in one's hair and October's long, silken spiderwebs threaten to tie one down, Lilliputian like, to reality, one has to break his bonds in a suitable manner such as improvising a little on such fixed things as the history of old quilt patterns.

On cold winter nights when an extra quilt feels comfortable, I open the quilt chest lid, letting out a little of the trapped Autumn fragrance, choose one of the lovelies, say the Turkey Tracks quilt, and go back to sleep, thinking of the wild turkeys that used to sound from atop Simms Mountain where the star fell.

REJOICE!