Summary Of The Poem 'Water Quilt' By Ron Rash

Each spring as the weather warms thoughts turns towards airing out the house and beginning the process of spring cleaning after a long winter. Ron Rash’s poem “Water Quilt” illustrates the chore of spring cleaning with a twist. During leaner times the people of Appalachia would use the river as a source for all household water use including cooking and cleaning. The tradition of taking all the bedding to the river to wash would have been a yearly ritual. Rash explains the reason this ritual continues here “the only water she believed \ pure enough to rinse away the silt \ of work grime, worry, fever,” (5-7) The water in the river could potentially be much cleaner than some water from a city source giving some legitimacy to the belief that only