No Time on My Hands

When T was visiting last week, she brought me a copy of a Fons and Porter magazine from 2005. Someone had given her a stack of them and she had saved this particular one for me because it focused on western prints and quilt patterns. She is such a thoughtful friend and as soon as I flipped it open, I found something I had to have:

The title alone grabbed me immediately and then the description sealed the deal and I ordered it lickity split from here . 

From Amazon:
"When Grace Snyder, the matriarch of a pioneer Nebraska family, wrote these reminiscences in her eightieth year, she felt she had been blessed "by having no time on my hands." The story of her busy life begins on the high plains of Nebraska, where her parents homesteaded in 1885. She recalls her childhood in a sod house on a frontier that required everyone to pull together in the face of hostile weather, serious illness, and economic depression but that also held its full share of good times.

"As a child of seven and up," writes Grace Snyder, ". . . I wished that I might grow up to make the most beautiful quilts in the world, to marry a cowboy, and to look down on the top of a cloud. At the time I dreamed those dreams and wished those wishes, it seemed impossible that any of them could every come true." But she saw all of them realized.

No Time on My Hands is a remarkable chronicle of the sod house era and of Grace Snyder’s married life on a ranch in Nebraska’s sandhills. From there she finally flies above the clouds to exhibits where her quilts contribute to a worldwide revival of quiltmaking. Mrs. Snyder lived twenty years after the publication of these memoirs in 1963, to the age of one hundred. Her daughter, Nellie Snyder Yost, who helped to write No Time on My Hands, has added an epilogue to this Bison edition.

DH was born and raised in those Nebraska sandhills and I love these kinds of books. I think people's lives are fascinating.

 This is told to Nellie, her daughter, who also wrote Pinnacle Jake about her dad. We've had that on our bookshelves for years, but DH was the one who made the connection when he saw "No Time on my Hands".

Life out here is pretty laid back, but we're always busy and never bored. We rarely watch tv - except for UFC. :) , and about the only computer time I have is the time I take to write this blog and I try to keep up with y'all through your blogs, although at the time, I am woefully behind - We praise God, play hard, work hard, sleep hard, and eat good! :) 

Right now, I don't have any time on my hands, but according to Grace, that's a blessing and I have to agree, although I sure am anxious to allocate some of my time to reading about Grace's life. I'm pretty darn sure I'm going to appreciate the fact that although I am going to be tuckered out from all of this cooking by the end of Fall Works, I am incredibly spoiled. I flipped a page open and read that her Daddy had built a sod house that was 12' x 14'. I am not going to fuss about my tiny kitchen and the 1000 dishes I have to wash by hand. Instead, I will be grateful that I don't have to haul my water from the creek.

Gosh, I would love to sit and visit with Grace. I'm thinking that no time on my hands makes for a pretty darn good life heaped with blessings and I'm betting I can learn a lot from her.