You see, you start out with jest so much caliker. You don’t go to the store and pick it out and buy it, but the neighbors will give you a piece here and a piece there, and you’ll have a pieve left every time you cut out a dress, and you take jest what happens to come. And that’s like predestination. But when it comes to cuttin’ out, why, you’re free to choose your own pattern. You can give the same kind o’ pieces to two persons, and one’ll make a “nine-patch” and one’ll make a “wild-goose chase”, and there’ll be two quilts made out o’ the same kind o’ pieces, and jest as different as they can be. And that’s jest the way it is with livin’. The Lord sends us the pieces, but we can cut ‘em out and put ‘em together pretty much to suit ourselves – and there’s a heap more in the cuttin’ out and the sewin’ than there is in the caliker.¹

1. From the forward of Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, & Scuppernong Wine by Joseph E. Dabney [↩]