Tag Archives: birthdays

Counting: bday, death, haiku

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This year on my birthday: 66. This year four days after my birthday: my mother will be gone for 27. It’s easy to keep track of her absence because she died a month before my younger son was born. I will always know how old he is.

Come a week in March, both boys will roll round one year older. THAT same week will mark my sister being gone four years.

The confluence of dates is not my doing. My mother died four days after my birthday and my sister died on one of my son’s birthdays.

Noticing is inescapable, in other words.

And it’s not morbid as it turns out. Listening to a conversation between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert while walking Finn this morning opened up some pockets of gladness or recognition or something. They talked about grief. How it’s a gift. Or rather, how still being alive is a gift. It’s more nuanced than that though, given how grief acts as a vessel for remembrance, celebration.

Both of them experienced devastating losses early. Cooper’s father died of heart disease when he was ten and then eleven years later his brother jumped off a building, killing himself (while their mother watched). Colbert also lost his father at age ten, but in an accident. That accident also claimed the lives of two of his brothers. Their conversation is really worth a listen.

I was born just after sunset in a hospital that no longer exists. Here’s a haiku I wrote last week.

Cooper is documenting cleaning out his mother’s apartment. She died in 2019 and apparently she left notes for him everywhere. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while.

Looking at this doll without a note, how would D know that I dyed the wool, cotton strips, and linen myself? Or that I knit the legs in the waiting room of Children’s Hospital while a surgeon put pins in his arm, all the while praying for his bones to knit (get it?) and heal. Or that the striped top came from a shirt I wore frequently when he was little, the collar from a cuff of a sweater of his dad’s?

PS it didn’t occur to me until after posting this that year zero for me would’ve been sixty-seven years ago. But the syllables don’t work for the haiku form!

Big cloth, small glass

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In progress, all over the living room: the six panels for First Born’s bed-sized quilt.

Will I finish in time for an upcoming birthday? Probably not. But finishing is the goal.

I keep finding glass from the shattered tumbler — in the dishwasher, on the floor.

I canvassed for Warren yesterday. The NV results were discouraging but here are three ideas to remember (cling to?):

  • Bill Clinton lost IA, NH, and NV;
  • the 75,000 early ballots in NV were cast before the most recent debate; and
  • Warren raised $12MM after that debate.

My last bday celebration took place across town last night with two long-time friends — one a fellow February baby, the other the host and a terrific cook. We’re all getting older. Actually, we’re all terrific cooks, too!

We sat by the fire and talked about all kinds of things, including — ESG-filtered investments, dating apps, grandchildren, Harriet Tubman, the NV caucus, butter beans, and how to survive in a wholly altered America.

“We only have each other. Small, local communities.”

I wonder: what kind of paperwork does one need to live, say, in Montreal?

We swapped inspiring links. I offered up the Future Primitive podcast link about regenerative design and B gave me (another) terrific astrology link as well as this:

Trash to Treasure

So if as Maddow says this is not the threat of dark times but the dark time themselves, it seems incumbent upon all of us to document gratitude and small miracles.

This orchid seems poised to bloom. It’s a kind of miracle if you ask me — especially because I know nothing about orchids or what they need. There’s a sky light, so maybe that?

The orchid was a long ago bday gift from D, who cooked dinner last night. From Georgia. The butter bean expert.

Friendship is a kind of miracle, too, don’t you think? Connections local and, I would add, connections, here. Much gratitude for these. For you.

 

Where is she now?

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This quilt was constructed earlier this year — in February — mulling over what creates a distinctive impress in a life. My mother, for instance, loved Paris. She only traveled there a few times, but it was a place she felt at home and alive. With a tin ear for language, it wasn’t that. It was the fashion, the lively street markets, the delicious food.

This is one of my Remix Quilts — the central section being from a quilt that was cut up and then built around. So, as is typical with these kinds of pieces, some areas have up to 7 layers, others only three.

Last note — the word “Paris”, visible in this close up (you can see the entire quilt in flickr, on the sidebar), was part of a printed shirt.  As usual, the prints I ‘happed upon” while composing dictated the direction of assembly and my thoughts.

It was February, around the anniversary of my mother’s death as well as near my birthday (fortunately not the same day). These are two times that I think about her more than usual —

(do other mothers find that once you’ve given birth, your OWN birthday becomes a celebration of one’s mother in a way it had not been before? I have found so) —

so when I found the word ‘Paris’, suddenly this little house became a meditation on my mother.  I heard the phrase, “Where is she now?” as I stitched.