Despite a full-time job, Leger finds time to give back


 

WINSTED — MaryPat Leger enjoys giving back to her community — she said it’s fun for her as well as rewarding. While she does maintain a full-time job, she considers that to be more of what she does in her spare time.

Leger grew up in Newington and moved to Winsted about 27 years ago. A mother of three, JoelPatrick, 28, Tony, 20, and Emmarose, 16, Leger held a variety of jobs, ranging from an architectural designer to teacher, while raising her children. She is married to Victor Leger, local artist and teacher. Leger is currently employed as a reading consultant at the Cherry Brook Primary School in Canton.

While her work is fulfilling, Leger’s passions lie in gardening and quilting.

Throughout spring and summer, travelers of Main Street may see Leger, complete with her wide-brimmed hat, planting flowers in the medians or clearing brush off the bands of the Mad River near the Riverwalk. Leger has taken over the maintance of the two areas.

"When you go to an arboretum, they are so beautiful. It only looks that way because someone is managing it," said Leger. "It takes a lot of management. The first year we focused on the middle of the hillside, the second year we focused on the little bank that goes down to the river. This year we are focusing on the upper bank, which goes from the paved path to Prospect Street."

In the first year that the Riverwalk rehab project began, Leger said she had a great deal of help and community support, but the last few years she has managed the project with mostly her family members. The team works to clear brush, sumac and invasive plants and trees, such as the thorny black locust tree that has taken over the banks of the river.

Aside from her "adopted" gardening projects, Leger has also taken on a massive quilting project, which began with the creation of a quilted panel in 1976.

Throughout the years, Leger carried with her a patriotic quilt panel she designed for a college class. She never quite found the time and energy to complete the quilt. It was when her oldest son, JoelPatrick, was to return home from Iraq, where he served with the 101 Airborne (the Screaming Eagles), that Leger found the motivation to complete the quilt.

"When JoelPatrick was in Iraq, the Riverton Grange sent him, at our address, a commemorative pillow with his name, rank and dates," said Leger.

After seeing the pillow, she placed it on his bed and decided it was time for her to finish her quilt and give it to her son.

"I had a month. I got out the patchwork top and got it together and quilted it up and that was when I got hooked on quilting," said Leger.

Leger began quilting for everyone. JoelPatrick mentioned Quilts of Valor, a group that makes quilts for wounded servicemen. After researching the organization, Leger began making and sending quilts for military personnel injured in the line of duty. Joining forces with some friends, Leger took her passion one step further and created Sew Grateful Quilters.

Twice a month Leger and her group meet at the Winchester Congregational Church and make quilts for Quilts of Valor. Since the group’s inception, almost two years ago, Sew Grateful has sent 45 quilts overseas.

While the group is mostly women, there is one man who wanted to be involved and charged himself with providing refreshment to the busy sewers.

In addition to the sewing, making the quilts takes a lot of ironing, cutting and stitch removal (for the occasional mistake), and Leger encourages anyone who would like to be involved to join. "We have several people who don’t sew, but iron and rip, and keep the people at the sewing machines going."

During the course of one of the group’s sew-a-thons, Leger was trying to decide how to fill in a blank space on the quilt she was making. She decided to stitch in a screaming eagle, in honor of her son, and asked that it be given to a soldier from her son’s unit, if at all possible.

"It actually went to a patient who came in from the Screaming Eagles the night the quilt arrived," said Leger, who received a note from one of the nurses in the hospital. In addition, Leger received a long letter from the serviceman’s wife, who was pregnant at the time and missing her husband. Leger was so moved that she made a quilt for the woman and her baby and sent it to their home in Tennessee.

For Leger, quilting is a way of giving back. She also says it’s her way of giving a hug.

When you see a soldier, Leger said, "You think this is a big tough Marine, but the war has affected them so much that they are curled up in a quilt and that is their only comfort.

"In past wars women came together to roll bandages or sew uniforms. So this is our way to come together to show that we care."

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less