My favourite quilt is always on my bed. Even in warm weather. It is not a large quilt but very beautiful: made up of many brightly color1ed woolen squares of every imaginable color1--red, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, cream. From the start, I loved this quilt. Just to look at it is to feel comforted. How many years have passed since my mother gave the quilt to me and my husband Ray Smith? I can only guess: thirty years? thirty-five? The beautiful little quilt in all the color1s of the rainbow has followed me from one house to another. The same bed, in different bedrooms in different houses in different periods of my life. In this most recent period, the quilt is laid on my bed in a house in Princeton, New Jersey, into which I moved in 2009. My mother visited this house. When she'd visited Ray and me in my former home, less than five minutes from this house, Mom had always helped out in the garden; we would garden together, and we would prepare meals together, while my father, a gifted amateur pianist, played my piano in the living room.  Whenever my parents came to visit us, my mother would bring gifts for us: mostly items she had knitted, or sewn. For years, I wore dresses and jackets my mother had sewn. There is nothing so comforting as wearing clothes your mother has sewn or knitted for you. In February 2008 when my husband was in hospital, and after he died unexpectedly a week later, often I lay in bed too exhausted to move, beneath the rainbow-color1ed quilt. The bed became my shelter, and my "nest". My mother's quilt made me realize how love lasts in the most comforting way. We desire comfort, but comfort can come to us from only a few sources. I know that I have been very fortunate. I never stop giving thanks to my wonderful parents who gave me their love, for this quilt on my bed, as special and beautiful in 2013 as it was in the late 1970s. After her husband's death, the quilt helped the author   _  .
remember the happy moments in the past understand the importance of true love get through the hard times find the meaning of life