The Importance of Being AND

For so much of my life, my deepest internal struggle has been figuring out which lunch table to sit at. 

Remember the junior high lunch room?  If you loved to read and you did your homework, you sat with the Smart Girls. If you liked sports, you sat with the Jocks. If you puffed cigarettes in the bathroom and wore black eyeliner, you sat with the Greasers. If your sweater matched your knee socks and your hair was perfectly straight and you wore a bra (but not a very big one), well, you might be able to sit with the Popular Girls.

I loved to read and to play first base. I had the right bra and the wrong hair. I thought black eyeliner was scary and loved those Greaser girls who were my snow fort buddies in third grade. So where was I supposed to sit?

By high school, the boundaries between tables relaxed. You were probably relieved. I was bewildered. A cheerleader AND she smokes pot? A Freak AND she got a merit scholarship to college?  A Smart Girl AND she wears overalls and work boots... AND black eyeliner?

And.  A concept that has been as difficult for me in adulthood as it was in junior high.  It seems like most people who create wear And with great ease and I envy their freedom.  At 58, I am far better at it than I used to be, but every once in awhile, the rumble from the lunch room starts anew.  

This time, it started with my stitching. 

Over the past six months, I've been a Spirit Cloth junkie. My stitches are starting to tell my stories. They have coaxed me back to my writing.In fact,like so many people who follow Jude, I find that those little lines of invisible basting are connecting me to myself in ways I cannot describe. So all has been copacetic in the Just Going lane. 

Until my most recent applique project came back after months at the machine quilter. 

excuse the photo, you'd need a helicopter to get this right

I took Kim McLean's Lollipop pattern and colored entirely within the lines. All of the fabric is commercially printed and none of it is recycled (I originally intended to use only fabric scraps from work but that challenge quickly went by the wayside.)  In short, it is as different from my current work as it could be. 

And here's the truth: the contrast between those two worlds knocked me off balance. Where am I supposed to sit? 

Which got me thinking about And.  A world where all those things could be true AND the work remains full of Spirit.  Because this cloth introduced me to the peace of handwork and the joy of unbridled color. I started it in 2008 trying to match every last leaf to Kim's pattern and finished it in 2012 letting the circles fall where they may.  I love the old ladies dancing in their sundresses...

...the redheaded boy shyly offering a bouquet....

...and my favorite, the guy showing off with his basketballs. 

My balance is back. I love this quilt. I am calling it Lollipop AND Me.  

It's amazing what a girl can learn in the lunch room. 

Another Day Without Sun

I repainted this bird feeder last summer in the same colors as our house.

 It has been grey here for so long that even the finches and chickadees 

don't feel like getting out of bed. 

There's some kind of TV show called "Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia."

Science fiction no doubt.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Greetings from Detroit...the postcard you send when you live in Detroit (or more likely, thereabouts).

I left Detroit after college...after years of reading the New York Times Classified Section every Sunday and wondering about this unbelievable land where there were actually want ads for artists, dancers, musicians...and writers. My brother saw the musician part and he soon followed.

Nothing was wrong with THAT picture. My folks came to visit, I went back for 30,000 mile psychological tune-ups, for weddings and funerals, to show off my babies and to dive into my beautiful fresh water Great Lakes (What is wrong with you ocean people, have you not noticed the salt??)

And life worked for us all.

The wrong part comes now, 37 years later. Because life at age 85 works differently, my parents want to be near me.  The assurance that I will land there as soon as a plane can take me is no longer enough...they feel frail, they are frail.  And so they decided it was time to leave.  Next month, they will be in an apartment near me here in Pennsylvania. They will leave behind everything they know, for although they are well-travelled, Detroit(ish) has been their home for their whole lives.They leave their brothers and sister, their bridge games and Torah study groups, the library where Mom used to work and the high school buddies Dad sees twice a week. 

They leave their son's grave.

Mom says she feels fine about leaving, she is mostly overwhelmed by the Stuff Management of a move and I can ease that for her. Dad moves through all the decisions like the hero he has become to me. When pressed, he tells me, "well, every once in a while, I do wonder what it will be like."

So this is what is heartbreakingly wrong with this picture.  I left home on a wind and a whim in the space between teen and adult and now, they are paying the price.  And they are not alone.  Aging parents around the country are becoming immigrants in a stage when it is oh so difficult to rip down and rebuild. And it is not because their offspring were seeking religious freedom, arable land, or sanctuary from bombs and bullets.

Its because they needed to be who they were. A writer. A musician. Fleeing from suburbia, flyng toward who knows what?

 I know I didn't do anything wrong, I know I am finding Grace in the role I have now taken on. I know I am by their sides in the ways they need it most.

It just seems so damn sad. Doesn't it?

Three Things Converge

Three things have converged this month.  First...this photo from last summer, when Jude was making rainbows from things in her path.

With kind permission, Jude Hill 2012

Second, the words to a song I heard on the radio: "You are where you have been."  (Still can't find the source of it, anyone know?)

And third, cloth weavings that I started after my knee replacement when I couldn't do much of anything besides sit in one place. I just cranked them out, one after another, without knowing why.  All I knew is that I felt so peaceful, so healed in the ripping, weaving, and stitching. (Don't know why this happens but it never fails. Anyone know why, or perhaps who really cares why?)

So that led to this fruit-juicy sandwich.

When you lay out a representative from each color, you get stuff like this:

 So these three things have converged into my Story Cloth.  "I Am Where I Have Been."  

The weavings will dance in some sort of spectrum around a central cloth (not sure what yet)...on each one, I want to stitch a chapter of where I have been.  Maybe a path that wanders through each and walks into the center. 

And where have I been in 58 years that defines me? In the northern Michigan forests, in the wilderness of Israel, in daughterhood, motherhood, in love, in divorce, in infertility and adoption, in the wrong life, in the greatest romance in the world, in Hebrew and the chant of Torah, in intimate giggles with girls, in back seats with boys, in the smell of my horse's snort, in high heels, in dreams of cowgirls and ghost towns...see how it goes?

So its like telling the world you are on a diet (oh yeah, been there, too. Like maybe twice a year). I want to do this.

Billy Makes a Boro Bed

Several years ago, we got some fabulous, very expensive Keiko Goke fabric in at work.  Because Liza is so generous about employee discounts, I could get enough to make a duvet cover that made us very happy.   

Especially Billy Dog, who can't rest until he makes a nest. So duvet cover got sliced and diced and it all looked pretty grim until the "duh" bell went off in my head. I've been living the patchwork life...but the notion of making an actual patch went right by me. 

Now we have the start of a lovely boro bed.

After all, its really about how you look at it all...as a rip or as the heart of a patch?

Billy, meanwhile, is hard at work on his next project....boro futon.  With matching pillow.

 

Knowing When to Stop

I am hoping that this blog...its process of pausing to document, to notice...helps me connect all the loose threads of my life. Especially everything I am learning from Jude Hill and the wonderous stitchers over at Spirit Cloth.  Here goes.

She of No Body Fat violated our No Birthday Presents Treaty last fall.  I decided to retaliate with a bookmark that would echo my fascination with the icy blue of this winter's sky.  I saw the exact colors in some pieced scraps and a hunk of indigo and moon from Glennis Dolce. I began to stitch. 

It started with the three vertical colors on the right...but these kept expanding leftward as I couldn't find the feeling inside that said Done. Which forced more stitching...and then the white background...which forced more stitching...

7" x 4"

I finally stopped when I realized the bookmark was about to be bigger than the book. So mad at myself because I felt the precise moment when I should have put the piece down and just ran over it like a truck on a bag of potato chips. Lucky for me, Himself was in the room. He has the gift of seeing. He simply folded it in half. And it looked like winter AND a bookmark.

He saved the day. But I still wish I knew how to stop just slightly BEFORE it is time. In so many, many things...