slice of quilt

What are table runners but a slice of quilt. A single row of blocks. A sample size that can be pressed into service.
And so I have made a slice of March. A small flock of spring geese. A sample of feathery quilting.
I'm enjoying that euphoria that accompanies all quilting. The euphoria of The Finished.
Photos are called for at a time like this.
An attempt to capture the happiness.
To preserve the joy of the final stitch.
A record of practice and progress.

to grapple

What happened to Little Red Riding Hood?
What I mean to ask is what happened to the story?
I remember the plot being pretty straight forward.
Little girl travels alone to visit sick grandmother.
Encounters wolf.
Wolf impersonates grandmother after scaring her away.
Tries to eat Little Red.
Is dispatched by an axe wielding woodsman.
He was summoned by the grandmother, who although very ill, has managed to keep her cool, keep her wits about her and keep running until she finds help and returns.
Grandma the hero.
What's not to love about that story?
It teaches all kinds of marvelous things to children.
Go ahead and jot down a list.

Last week I checked out several versions of Little Red Riding Hood from the library. My grandchildren and I have been making up epic puppet tales and we have exhausted poor Goldilocks and are moving on to Little Red.
The only version I had in my own library was so watered down and sweetened up that it was barely recognizable.
Sadly, the handful of versions I brought home were no better.
One moralized by admonishing children to do as they were told to prevent trouble. Too preachy.
Another warned of stranger danger and actually scared me.
Another was written in creole slang and would have been almost impossible to read aloud. It did have a wonderful character swap in that the wicked wolf became an alligator, and the woodsman a cat with a bottle of Cajun hot sauce.
The version set in China had the mother depart to visit the grandmother whilst a wolf terrorized the children left home alone. They rose to the challenge literally by climbing a tree.

Death and danger and deceit exist in the world.
Stories are a way to grapple with those realities.
Isn't that a wonder?

on the way home

"Number 399...." a distant voice said. "Number 399?"
Winning a door prize is exciting stuff.
There had been an endless parade of happy winners clutching their loot.
And now, this one last number.
399.
Mine.
I hastened forward to claim the goods.

It wasn't a hoodie with a university logo.
It wasn't a coffee mug or a bulging book bag or a framed print or gift certificate to the salon.
It wasn't a potted plant or flowers either.
Those treasures were already being carted off, the spoils of war.

A huge bouquet of helium balloons was thrust into my hands.
Great black and white balloons with Holstein spots.
It felt like I'd been to the circus, or the PNE, or a birthday party at a dairy......
It felt festive and foolish at the same time.
I bopped and joggled them through the doorways and out into the windy courtyard.
The very windy courtyard.
I hunched against the icy stream of air and towed my bouquet along.
And then briefly, it towed me along and I turned and towed and turned again.
I struggled to open the car door, to stuff the bouquet into the back seat. Each balloon seemed determined to make a break for the skies but I manfully subdued them.
I dove behind the steering wheel and glanced into my rear view mirror to back up.
The balloon bouquet had recovered.
It had risen like a Phoenix from the ashes.
Not good.
Out I struggled and out they struggled, back into the wind.
A brief flurry til I opened my trunk and pushed the balloons in.
Helium and gravity were at odds.
It took both hands to beat them into submission.

I was at a writer's festival today.
Somehow those balloons seem the perfect reminder.
They remind me that writing is fun, even a celebration.
That taking things too seriously is a mistake.
And that effort and struggle may be necessary on the way home.

so has love

My grandfather left Norway the moment he reached legal age, the moment he turned sixteen. He had been poised for flight for ten years by then.
His story began a lifetime before though. In fact, the very beginning of the story cannot be told. It is like picking up a book and beginning to read somewhere in the middle. 
There are questions left unanswered that way of course,
mysteries and clues,
old photos,
fragments of story.
This photo is very old, and shows my grandfather’s own father as a young boy. The boy was raised by grandparents. I wonder why? They were said to have been overly indulgent, as were his older sisters.  Perhaps they were trying to give him something that he had lost. 
In the end, he lost his wife and his children, the family farm and his health.
I didn’t know that man, that great grandfather, but I did know his little boy, my wonderfully wise Norwegian grandfather.
My grandfather was six when his mother died. He was eldest of three with a little brother and sister.
His aunt traveled by steam ship across the Atlantic to take them to live with her in America but the grandmother would not let the eldest, my grandfather go. His little brother and sister were torn from his life then.
The pages of his childhood are difficult to read; his father forgetting and drinking to forget, the family farm slipping through his fingers.
Loss has a way of staining ahead, touching one generation and reaching into the next.
But so has love.
And love is not weakened by time or distance.
My grandfather loved his brother and sister. That love was great, even greater than his terrible loss. It gave him a dream; a single-minded purpose. It drew him across the Atlantic, straight and true.
His brother and sister were there.
He got to be with them again, to know them, to love them.
He lost his sister in the flu epidemic too soon, but his brother was a constant in his life for the next sixty years how ere the winds of life blew.
To live is to know loss. It is a part of everyone’s story.
But love is too.
And it has the power to heal and free.
It lets us write the present over the past.

white

Yesterday the air was filed with swirling snow as fine as powdered sugar. Today, the sun is casting long blue shadows everywhere.
Snow is sparkling.
It's a white world.
White and bright.
A flurry of wings startled me though. I expected to see the gang of crows that usually patrol the street but there was a flash of white.
And then another.
Huge white wings.
Wings like arched eyebrows.
Seagulls.
Gee, what do they know that we don't know.
Gulls do come inland. That isn't really unusual but they haven't been tourists in my neighborhood before.
They chose the right day to come.
Garbage day.
Maybe the word was on the street.
I can see white wings against the blue, circling above the distant trees where the crows roost.
But there isn't a crow in sight.

always there

"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." W.B.Yeats

The magic is always there.
Whether I notice it or not.
 A few moments outside are all it takes.
Just a few steps outside into the sunshine or the swirling snow.
Past gardens trim or tangled.
Birds overhead.
The wind my companion.

the love

Don't you find that knowing who a poet wrote something for makes the words even more powerful?
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote,
'But time which none can bind
While flowing fast away
leaves love behind.'
He wrote it for his cousins.
He remembered all the games they had played as children.
The make believe.
The adventures.
And now as adults, they sat together before the fire and he remembered and was thankful.
I tried to read those lines aloud to my mother but didn't do very well.
I got through the part about time, and felt my voice tightening as I read about it flowing fast away, but it was the love that made me cry.