Garrett County author William Pickrel’s new novel opens with an admission sheet, a crossed-out name, and a blanket nobody in the building can read.
NEWS PROVIDED BY
Unneen Truth
Sept. 4, 2026
OAKLAND, Md., Sept. 4, 2026 /Standard Newswire/ — The quilt has been on the second shelf of the linen closet for years. The aides take it down when a resident is cold. None of them knows what it is made of.
The morning Ruth Vollmer is admitted — eighty-eight, a stroke, six words left — an aide named Brenda Deitz carries it down the hall and spreads it over her. Ruth’s hand goes out across the squares and closes on a crooked patch of gray work shirt at the edge, and will not let go.
She sewed it in January 1947. It was the coldest winter anybody could remember, there was frost on the inside of the bedroom glass, and there was not a wool blanket to be had in the county. Her husband’s Army uniform was still hanging on the back of the bedroom door where he had put it the night he came home from the Pacific. She took it down and cut it up, and cut up her own wedding dress with it, and dropped the buttons into the sugar bowl.
Her admission sheet lists one grandson, in Baltimore. There is a son as well, written down and then crossed out in ballpoint, gone over twice, the number underneath still readable.
“Enough to Cover Us” is the new novel from William Pickrel, who has lived in Garrett County since 1981. He wrote to honor the anniversary of his father’s death and the loss of his mother a few years before that. It moves between Ruth’s marriage after the war and the last five months of her life. He wrote it for readers who have sat in those hallways: nurses, nursing home staff, quilters, and anyone who has buried a parent.
Retired from the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services and a foster resource parent since 1995, Pickrel has published more than thirty books, all at unseentruthbooks.com. His novel “The Rings” received the 2026 Christian Book Excellence Award for Christian Fiction Literature.
“Enough to Cover Us” is available now in paperback, hardcover and Kindle at https://a.co/d/04kcBOYm.
Pickrel lives about twenty minutes from Oakland Md and is available for interview by phone.
SOURCE Unseen Truth
CONTACT: William Pickrel, 301-501-8718, wpickrel@hotmail.com