My old feisty friend, Louise, is gone now. But boy, did she give it a good run.

After 94 years, my mother’s and my dear friend wasn’t challenging her world anymore. Instead, she was amazed at her good fortune. “They take my social security and give me all this — a warm room, a great sack, and three hots a day.” In her flat Boston accent, she continued, “I get sixty bucks a month — it pays my phone, cable, and an occasional hairbob. Sometimes I watch TV all night,” she grinned.

Louise’s precious house had become an unhealthy burden and she was forced to sell. Every week the grass grew faster. Then it found the cracks in the driveway.

The shingles needed some paint and she could no longer reach the outside windows. It was time to go.

I can’t imagine strangers in the little Cape Cod house that Louise and Ovid built after he returned home from Germany in 1945. Nights and weekends between their factory shifts, they built it – crafted it for themselves – in nine months. They proudly called it their baby. During my last visit, she reminisced about perfecting the smoothly arched doorways, the pristine crown molding, the carved mantle.

The long years had moved her head forward as she lost her height. During my last visit to her house, she needed a hook to pull the attic stairway down from the ceiling. As the stairs gradually descended towards us, she said, “I have to show you my legacy.” I followed as she slowly climbed the slanted steps.

The cleanly swept attic was almost bare but for the collection of trunks and covered plastic tubs. She opened the trunks to show me her handmade quilts. The first trunk held about a dozen baby quilts and many lap quilts. There were trunks for each bed size except king. “I can’t handle that amount of cloth on my lap – the coroner would find me buried in yards and yards of cotton daisies… can’t do it.” I laughed, and then almost cried as she gave me my choice of her handwork. The half-dozen tubs were filled with her potholders.

As I headed for the lowered steps, I glanced up at the center crossbeam of the roof and stopped in my tracks. Louise had scrawled across the large wooden beam a penciled history of their life together. Most events were dated. At the far end was written, “We never had children.”

Back downstairs, and looking out the kitchen window, I noticed cheery nasturtiums twining around the porch. She had planted the seeds with her neighborhood kids. “Their parents pay them no attention. It gets my feathers up!” She told me that some days five girls visit, sometimes ten. “After the parents fight all night, my kids rest here. We talk, we make Jell-O, sometimes I change their bandages. We watch travelogues so they will know there is a world out there. I teach them manners and tell tales from the old days… I have to clean up some stories,” she winked. “We sew, we sing, and we laugh a bunch.”

What Louise taught her girls to sew were her homespun potholders.

In the 30 years following Ovid’s death and her retirement, Louise made thousands of colorful, pancake-sized potholders. Friends provided fabric, her imagination supplied the appliqued designs – white doves, Mr. Peanut, bunnies, clowns, and dozens more. She sewed at all hours on her machine, the Discovery Channel blaring night or day. No potholder was complete until she tugged four little stitches through the cloth – her initials, L and V. She taught the girls, and two boys, to hand stitch their own monograms into their completed holders.

Louise’s potholders were her currency of kindness, and she carried a tote full of them everywhere she went. “Everybody needs them,” she said. And when anyone protested, she insisted they take it. “If you don’t cook, give it to the one who feeds you.”

She gave angel potholders to plumbers and to tellers at the bank. She dispensed flowered potholders to garbagemen, with special lilies for priests; she made a carpenter design for her hip surgeon, and gave a pink pussycat from her backseat stash to the cop who caught her speeding.

Back at the nursing home, Louise told me that she gave her last potholder to the ambulance driver who brought her in last October. “And that was that,” she shrugged, as we ambled toward the lobby. Gripping her walker, she flipped her bathrobe to two old men, singing, “Woo-woo!” Her irreverent laughter filled the hallway. I have seen her act serious, but never unhappy.

It seemed the Lady Louise had found another home.

Marcy O’Brien writes from Warren. She can be reached at moby.32@hotmail.com