Since my last dispatch we've been busy - Bob's about to open a new show at SU, it's been an intense effort to bring it to fruition. Thursday will lay that to rest, and the quarter will be over before we know it, his second year coming to an end! Hard to believe...
Last month we made a quick escape to the WA Coast for some razor clamming - had a great time with the Britt-Dunlaps, and hit our limit (15 per person) both days. There's something about the ocean that really soothes the soul - and the bags full of clam meat are frosting on the cake!
At the end of April, I took a solo trip to Eastern WA to visit some friends who grow peaches and raise alpacas. I'd never visited the farm where my favorite fruits come from, and it was a huge treat to finally see it after all these years (I met them in ~1998 when we were vending our baked goods from the Cafe at the U-District Farmers Market)...I camped in the orchard and got to hang out with the alpacas while Marilynn took clippings of their fleece for a friend of mine who spins and wants to buy some fiber to work with. It was a nice break from the urban rat race - sagebrush, open sky, sunshine...
In between all that, working in the garden and enjoying the unfolding of spring. We have a bushtit nest in our pine tree, American goldfinches are passing through (bright yellow birds of spring), the raccoons have visited a couple more times, but no harm has come to the chickens. Neighbors are emerging, blinking into the light - the days are longer and the air is sweet with pollen and the scent of flowers of all sorts.
It was Mothers Day on Sunday, and Eleanor was much on my mind...A co-worker's mom unexpectedly fell ill last week and passed away on Saturday, and my heart was heavy with his sad loss. At the same time, I have been thinking of my own mom quite a bit lately - but with much greater ease than at any time in the past year and a half since she died. My thoughts of her have been less and less about the illness and hospitalization that dominated in the months after her death, and increasingly comforting, springing up randomly when I'm in the midst of the mundane chores of daily life - laundry, dishes, changing the beds, cooking.
I realized this weekend that I often think of her when doing things she taught me how to do in her inimitable way - likely learned from her own mother and aunts and passed along. Ruminating on this epiphany while folding the week's laundry, it occurred to me that mom was a crafty sort in her own way, and wholly encouraged these tendencies in me from the beginning. I subsequently had a long train of reminiscences - with windows desperately needing a Walter Parry washing flung open to admit the spring breeze, birds chirping away in the back yard - starting way back with my earliest cooking adventures and meandering along through crochet lessons (granny square baby blankets for one and all!), mail-order craft kits, story book writing/illustrating, tadpole collecting, violin instruction, shop classes (wood and metal), foreign language study & international travel, photography, etc...
And I realized that, while I rarely saw Mom actively engaged in any such hobbies while growing up (her main endeavor during those years was raising her children), my love of working with my hands was deeply influenced by her unfailing support of even the most outrageous ideas (green tuna noodle casserole, anyone?). Last year, during my first visit home after the funeral I was distraught about how I still missed her so much one year later, and my friend Amy said, "But Carol, don't you know that she's right here with you, and you can talk to her anytime you need to?" - at the time it didn't feel that way to me at all, I was still so immersed in the loss.
But, with every month that passes my thoughts of Mom grow easier, and I can see that she is indeed very much with me every step of the way. I'm sure I'll never stop missing her, but I'll never be completely without her either. Phew!
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