Howard

“The quilt was spread out, held by the women. They looked down at the cloth and then up at each other. The room grew quiet, breathlessly silent, so the boy could hear Kristina breathing as she slept upstairs, and he looked at the women's hands holding the edges of the quilt and none of them gripped hard but seemed instead to almost caress the cloth and he knew that he was seeing a sweet thing, a dear thing, like when his mother's face was there looking down on him as he awakened from a nap, or when his grandmother looked at him when she held him. Love. He did not know for sure exactly what love was but his mother had said she loved him, and loved his father. And his grandmother had said she loved him when she had that soft look, and he thought of it now. Love, they loved the cloth, no, loved the quilt, no, loved each other. They loved each other and the quilt and the cloth and it meant something he didn't understand.”
― Gary Paulsen, The Quilt