Catching up with my life

I feel that, in the time of Covid, I was given the gift of time for working, exploring, thinking and planning. After a long period of this uncertain time, though, the urge to be in the world, to look and be inspired, needed to be fed. I fell into organizing and cleaning things, sorting my house and studio into stacks of Save, Keep, Trash, and Still Good But No Longer For Me. This was a lot of fun for a week. And then the enormity of what I was doing set in. I wanted to stitch-- but every surface was covered with the Sorted and To Be Sorted.

After a challenging 2022, I am returning to a semblance of normality. The guest room is a mess, but it allows the rest of the house to be habitable. The studio, much reduced in content, is becoming manageable. Thus, I am able to work again-- but with a few caveats. The first is a retinal bleed, which has left me with a blind spot in one eye. The second is the lingering effects of Covid, which we contracted in May of this year. My husband was lucky enough to have had a light case, or we would be in terrible shape today. My Covid experience was not mild. He does the heavy lifting; I don't contribute very much, except to be profusely thankful and praise his efforts.

All of this culminates in a birthday that is a pause in the road. I am at an age when birthdays are celebrated as victory laps for having survived another trip around the sun. Having looked at my life and my studio and decided that I will never spin again, there is that equipment and wool roving to be set aside, to find someone who is interested in setting out on the spinning path themselves. I hesitate because there are memories attached to all of this, particularly of my grandson, still in elementary school, helping me to assemble the wheel, sand and stain it, of my son modifying the oriface because the one that came with it was not the one I had ordered, of my grandson learning to spin (because he is a Master Of All Things Mechanical), and both grandchildren having fun learning to create new colors of roving with the drum carder. The children are teens, now, and have lives completely disconnected from the studio, and neither is interested in the fiber arts anymore.

So, in this gentle autumn interlude, I will photograph the equipment and advertise it for sale. It will be a major step in letting go. I need to do this now, not wait and leave everything to someone else to clear away one day.

There is one piece to share with you. This 4" wall piece is wrapped around a wooden block. It was stitched earlier in the year. It is one of my favorite pieces from this part of my life.