First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who left comments with well-wishes and sympathy over the past month. I didn't reply, but they were all appreciated. I think it's amazing that people I've never even met can be so warm and caring.

I'm slowly fitting back into life at home. I feel sort of like a puzzle piece that's lost one of its "arms." Being away for a month puts everything out of kilter, and having everyone here tell me they're so sorry doesn't help. They all look at me like they expect me to burst into tears at any moment, but I think I'm pretty much past that stage. (All bets are off this coming Sunday, though, what with the Hallmarkiness and everything.)

Fiber-wise, I've just been working on three little hardanger bookmarks to enclose as thank-you gifts to people up in Maine who helped out my dad and me while Mom was in the hospital. I haven't done any knitting, spinning, or anything else since I've been home. I haven't even worked on the little child's aran sweater I started in the hospital.

I really should get back to Dad's sweater since it's almost done, but I haven't felt like it. I was thinking about this lack of interest in knitting last night, and realized that I may be putting off finishing the sweater because I was working on it when Dad called to tell me about Mom's accident. Negative associations, there.

I think I need some quiet spinning time.

1943-2005

On April 23, 2005, my mom passed away. Mom is gone. I keep hearing that in my mind, and I still can’t believe it. Even now more than a week later, it seems unreal, like a bad dream that I can’t wake up from. I don’t think I would have ever been ready to go to the funeral of either of my parents, but this was so sudden. She wasn’t old, she wasn’t sick, there was no long-term health problem that we could come to terms with; she was just taking a short drive down the road to have lunch and knit with a friend when the accident happened.

The past month Emma and I spent with my dad in the hospital was one of the longest of my life. It was so hard to be there with him every day, to try to support him in our desperate hope that Mom would recover, or at least open her eyes, and still take care of and play with Emma. She was wonderfully behaved the whole time and brought a lot of smiles to my family and everyone else in the ICU Waiting Room. While I was glad she was there, it was heart-wrenching to look at my smiley happy girl and know that she had no idea what was going on.

What I regret most about this whole senseless tragedy is the lost time. Emma will never know her Grandma. She’s still too young to even remember her. Mom and Emma should have had maybe 25 or 30 more years to enjoy being grandma and granddaughter. They will never sew together, never bake a pie, never pick beans and pull up carrots in the garden, never watch the phoebes build their nest on the porch beams at the house in Maine. Mom won’t be there when Emma starts kindergarten, is in a school play or art show or concert, graduates high school and college, and won’t see her as a bride. There will be no more three-generation mother/daughter photos.

Mom and Dad had planned to come out to Friday Harbor and visit us this spring, and were looking forward to seeing our new house. April 20, the day they were planning to arrive, was the day my dad, sister, and I had to decide to discontinue life support and let Mom go.

Emma and I planned to spend a month on vacation in Maine this summer. Mom and I had hatched a plan to make a quilt together. I had even started looking at patterns and color combinations. I can’t even express how much I was looking forward to this.

I just keep thinking “This isn’t fair.” I know the corollary to that is “Life isn’t fair,” but this seems almost too unfair to bear.

I don't even know what to write. Mom hasn't come out of the coma, and the outlook is, in the words of the doctors, "grim." The medical consensus is that she will be in a persistant vegetative state. Yesterday we as a family decided to respect her wishes as stated in her living will, and withdrew life support. She's breathing laboriously on her own, but there's no hope she will get better.

No one should have to go through this, her or us.

I may not be posting much in the next little while. My mom was rear-ended in a horrendous car crash last Wednesday and Emma, Shaun and I flew back to Maine to be with her and my dad. Right now she's in a coma, and we're just waiting to see what happens.

I feel angry and miserable and desperately sad. Nothing seems worth doing anymore.

I hate being sick. I spent most of Sunday in bed, except when Shaun wasn't home and I had to be up with Emma. Thankfully, I seem to be over the worst of it now. At least the congestion has cleared out of my sinuses and my face no longer feels like it's going to explode. And the congestion didn't go into my ears this time, praise be!



Yum yum yummy chicken soup. I made this last night. Of course, I was feeling better by then, but earlier I was feeling to cruddy to even think about making soup. Ironic, that. Too sick to make soup that will make me feel better.

I didn't get much done on Dad's sweater over the weekend, obviously. I did about 15 rounds yesterday once I started feeling better, but there's still a long way to go. The beginnning rounds of the raglan decreases are so long and cumbersome! All the front, back and sleeve stitches, 450ish, jammed onto one 24" circular. It's always such a relief once a few decrease rounds are done and it's not so crowded. Once I get a few more decreases done, I'll switch to two circulars (front and sleeve on one, back and sleeve on the other) and knit it like socks on two circulars. It doesn't work very well to do that in the beginning rounds, since there are so many stitches- better to have them all contained on one needle.

Emma and I went off-island on Saturday (even though my throat was starting to feel a little scratchy....pay attention to those warnings, dummy!) to get her some new shoes. She had outgrown her size 4's, and the only shoes that fit were her boots. So we ventured to the stores on the mainland. I was shocked at how hard it was to find a pair of just regular sneakers. I don't want ones that light up, or make sounds, or have Disney Princesses or Barbie or lace on them, or cost $60. (SIXTY dollars for a pair of toddler sneakers that will be outgrown in two months???!!!!) We just needed a pair of plain shoes that won't fall apart in a week, that she can run around in and get dirty. Geesh. Is that so much to ask? We finally did get a pair of size 6's at Fred Meyer, but only after looking at two discount stores and three shoe stores.



That they were on sale and only cost $10 was great, but they were also the only non-commercial, non-lighted pair we saw all day. What ever happened to the little red or blue canvas sneakers thay used to sell?

Emma and I are off to playgroup in a little while. Today is her last time at this particular group, since it is only for babies up to 18 months. Now we'll only be able to go to the toddler group. They always have a little "graduation ceremony" when a kid leaves the group, with crackers and juice and the presentation of a "diploma." I'll bring the camera to preserve the moment for posterity, and will probably get all teary and sloppy.

I finished the second sleeve last night. Tonight I will redo the calculations for the raglan decreases and start knitting the yoke. The end is in sight! At least I don't have to do the calculations from scratch- just plug in new numbers to the write-up from the first time around, allowing for a deeper armhole. Thank goodness I kept good notes!



I spun the rest of the Colonial roving this morning while Emma was napping, and plyed it all up while she was engaged in transferring Cheerios from bowl to bowl after lunch. (Putting little things in containers is really big with her right now.) This is 15.5 oz. and 1020 yds of three-ply.



Love it. Love the colors, love the softness, love the squishability. I was browsing around the web the other day, and I'm reasonably sure this was Ashland Bay Trading Company top. The colorway looks just like the "Teal Multicolor Top" shown on their website. I s'pose I could call the store I got it from, to be sure. I would definitely buy Ashland Bay top again, if that is indeed what it is. Great product, super easy to spin.

The little skein farthest away in the picture is the "leftover skein," Navajo-plied from the last bobbin that had singles on it. It's only about 100 yds. I was surprised at how well it matches the other skeins. It's slightly fuzzier and slightly more uneven since it wasn't made of three separate singles smoothly run together all in the same direction, but really, it doesn't look bad. If I run short of yarn on Emma's sweater, it will do fine for cuffs. I was also glad to see that Navajo plying "clicked" for me this time. Last time I tried it, about a year ago, I couldn't keep up and got an overtwisted mess. This time my hands just seemed to know what to do.

I'm rolling along, making good progress on the sweater- I stayed up waaaay too late last night. I finished three repeats of the big cable while catching up on all the episodes of Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis I missed while the inlaws were here. I love TiVo.

Emma and I spent a lovely couple hours working in the garden yesterday. I got all the dead flowerheads clipped off the lavender, daisy, and oregano plants, pulled out the dead petunias, and chopped the Dusty Miller and Russian Sage back basically to the ground. The Dusty Miller was frost-damaged and looked straggly, and the Russian Sage was wildly out of control. Both have lots of new shoots showing, so I think they'll come through fine and be lovely and bushy this summer. There was a ginormous peppermint plant that I cut off every stem taller than one inch. It looks to be taking over the corner of the garden by the deck, and maybe this will slow it down. (Yeah, right. I'll probably have to dig out the whole thing and put it in a pot to contain it. Even that may not work. It is deliciously fragrant, though.) I also pulled about 10 bucketloads of weeds from the paths and beds, though that was just the tip of the iceburg. The garden looks so much better now, with the plants trimmed. There are LOTS of slugs, though, and they are chomping the pansies we planted a week or so ago. I may invest in another cheap window box and replant them in that to get away from the slugs. Nothing else seems affected. I found at least four different kinds of lavender, so it will be really pretty to see them start to bloom.

While I was working, Emma mostly played. She used the trowel to transfer walkway gravel to a 4" pot, then dumped it out and started again. That lasted about 45 minutes. For a while, she helped with the weeding, but lost interest in that fairly quickly. Then she discovered the slugs. Slugs are fun, slugs are slimy, slugs are the coolest thing ever. They are fun to pick up and bring over to put in a pile by Mommy. Especially fun was the 6" banana slug she found under a lavender plant. She carried it around for a good five minutes before we let it go in the woods, unharmed. A girl after my own heart.