Daisy V. Ortega, who died Sept. 25 in Alamosa at age 90, was an old-school wife and mother, preferring wood stoves to microwave ovens, and sewing counterpanes so intricate that the Colorado Historical Society showcased one in a 2002 exhibit.
"Who can live like that? I can't, but Mom wanted to start the fire in her wood stove every morning," said her daughter, Daisy M. Ortega, distinguished from her mother both by her nickname - Little Daisy - and her devotion to modern conveniences.
Born Oct. 3, 1915, in San Luis, she was the daughter of Moises de la Luz Vigil and Teresa de Jesus Garcia. Both families date their heritage back to the time when this part of Colorado remained a Spanish land grant.
She married A. Praxedes Ortega, who belonged to another family whose roots ran deep in the San Luis Valley, in 1936.
The wedding took place in the Sangre de Cristo church, a cornerstone in the Ortegas' lives.
It was where their children were baptized and received the Catholic sacraments, where the family attended midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and the annual Easter sunrise service. When Daisy Ortega learned colcha embroidery, a Spanish colonial technique, she was the one chosen to repair the church's prized altar cloth, which was used for her final sacrament.
"At her funeral, one of Father Pat's words about Mom was this palla she had redone 20, 30 years ago," Little Daisy Ortega said.
"He took her this cloth, with beautiful symbols and emblems - one is a giant starburst of sequins - and elaborate gold trim, and the rest of it all rags. So Mom actually re-created this palla. She took off the symbols, and put them back on again when she finished. It was a beautiful tribute to my mother's handiwork."
Because she spent her life in Colorado's poorest county, Ortega believed firmly in the adage "Use it up, wear it out, make do or make without."
She baked the family's bread in her wood-fired oven, and cooked meals on its stovetop. To fill her tamales, she used the meat from a pig's head she boiled on her stove.
The pig's head came from the latest pig she had culled from the two or three kept, along with the chickens, in the Ortega's yard. The pigs functioned as living garbage disposals until they got big enough to butcher.
Daisy Ortega dressed each carcass after her husband helped hang it up. She wasted nothing, including the animal's stomach, which she meticulously washed and saved for menudo.
"Tell me, would you want to clean a pig's stomach?" Little Daisy Ortega asked.
"Imagine being a teenager with a mother who made soap, who helped process dead animals, cleaned their stomachs and made the menudo! Yuck! Mom was a real pioneer woman."
Ortega used a wringer washer, the ungainly precursor to modern washing machines. She felt it did a superior job of cleaning interminable mountains of laundry.
She sewed her children's clothes, stitched the tablecloth that covered the dining room table, and made the afghans, quilts and counterpanes that covered the family beds.
It never occurred to her to buy material for her sewing projects. Instead, she used scraps from outgrown dresses and shirts.
No scrap was too small for a cathedral-window coverlet, a dauntingly complex assembly of tucked and folded muslin squares that each disclose a bit of fabric. Every stitch is different, and each originates from a separate angle.
Though it was not technically a quilt in the purest sense of the word - the muslin squares contain no batting, and the flip side shows the squares sewn together without backing - one of Ortega's cathedral-window counterpanes was chosen for the 2002 "Quilts Speak: Stories in the Stitches" at the Colorado Historical Society.
Each of the coverlet's bright windows features fabric that once was part of an Ortega relative's shirt, skirt, dress, tie, pants or pajamas. Urged by her daughter Sandra Garcia to show the coverlet to Colorado Historical Society curator Alisa Zhaller, Ortega told the story within each window.
Here was a daughter's confirmation dress. Here was a toddler's skirt. Here was the suit her husband wore when he was a San Luis county judge. Here was a dress she wore as a young woman, sashaying past the filling station where her future husband worked.
"The decision for the quilts we selected was based on aesthetic qualities, the technique and the time period in which they were made, and the part of the state where they were from," Zhaller said.
"It had to do with Daisy, really, why I chose her quilt."
Survivors include sons Delfino Ortega of Rio Rancho, N.M., Prax Ortega Jr. of San Luis and John W. Ortega of Aspen; daughters Annette LaBanc of Strongsville, Ohio, Linda Taylor of Carson, Calif., and Sandra Garcia and Daisy M. Ortega, both of Alamosa; sisters Emma Espinoza of San Luis, Anna Patterson and Julia Wade, both of Northglenn, and Joie Carpenter of Littleton; 13 grandchildren; 15 great-grandchildren; and six great-great-grandchildren. Her husband, three children, one granddaughter, one brother and two sisters preceded her in death.
