handstories

still...

    "Nehama" for comfort.

    Thank you... for Dee's "honey bun" and the vision of Grace singing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star..." and all of your kind gentle loving words.  How comforting to have this community to lean into. 

    Just so sad.  Yesterday morning, home alone and shuffling stools, chairs, broom, etc. around trying to make things look different instead of empty.  There may have been sobbing over the washing machine while putting her blankets in.  Moon was home in the afternoon and we had a Star Trek Voyager marathon to distract ourselves.

    This morning's walk was in heavy fog, but the sun is coming out now.

    And I do want to say that there were some really good things that happened over the last week.

 

    I gave that zoom presentation and it went swell.  The group was so welcoming and lovely.  I do mean to share more about this experience.

  

    This afternoon we'll take Moon back to school, and there will be dinner with Deb G., and the pink blossoms are still able to shimmer through the dark mornings.

goodbye

    We said goodbye to our dear sweet Twinkle yesterday.

    Some of you might remember this... Part one, Part two, Part three.

 

    Moon dug a spot under the Japanese Maple, under the window where she perched on pillows stacked on a stool so that she could watch the birds.  The moment she was buried it began to rain and several birds landed in the tree above us singing loudly.

    A grieving cloth.

    We took away all of her things, places, pillows, bed by the heat register, blankets everywhere, etc.  Now there is emptiness scattered throughout the house.

    Heartbroken.

Time

    This was begun last month with beautiful blues from Jude.  It was a good place to rest.

    On Tuesday eve, while scrolling through photos on my phone, a photo of my Iowa friend popped up.  It was her senior high school portrait, taken over sixty years ago.  "Why is this here?" I wondered, and then created a new album of "Favorites" to put it in so that I wouldn't lose track of it.  K. and I talked about her for a few minutes. 

    A friend and I had gone to visit her a couple of weeks ago.  Time has been taking her piece by piece over the last few years, but still her delight and joy in spending time with us shined through.  It was a lovely sad visit.  Yesterday I received word that she had died on Tuesday night.  I will miss her dearly.  I loved it when she called me "Honeybun".  The "Iowa" category will tell you more about her, but this post sums our friendship up best.

    Twinkle has taken a turn, new meds, more "waiting and seeing" for a couple of weeks.

    More nightmares... at first I thought that they were frogs, but no.  The spiders were beautiful and terrifying.

    I keep saying (and feeling) that things are really fine, and they are.  I'm just out of words right now. Life slips by sometimes.

    "Everything Became Home"

(Golden pink moon cloth dyed by Tina.)

Blue

    (Well, that was an unexpected break from the internet.  More about that another day.)

    Today has been spent with the piece above.  It's about Blue, who was home for much of the last week.  All of the cloths in this piece are also in blankets that I've made for him over the years, starting with the rose print flannel that his first baby blanket was made from, his "Rosie."

    And looking at this cloth made ten years ago... It's full of mama feelings for him, too.  When I was wanting to hold him wrapped in flannel within the safe bubble of home.  I wrote about it here.

    There was a thought of putting a home on the hill in the new cloth, too, but I realized that would be about me.  His world is much more than that.

    This morning he landed in Santiago, Chile where he and a friend are hoping to live for the next year.  The plan is to be English tutors and whatever other jobs they can find to make ends meet.

    He sent the view from his apartment a bit ago.

    I am holding all of the feelings... so happy and excited for him, proud of his risk taking, and a little sad to know he's so far away.  I wish a big blue wide world for him, knowing that we are still under the same moon together.