That's Life!

(Please forgive the formatting...I can't get this program to come out in paragraphs.) It’s been a 18 months since I posted my last blog. I thought I was done because I really didn’t have anything to say anymore. Apparently, I was mistaken, because here I am again. When I first posted in June, 2013, the month I turned 65, I wrote “I’m hoping that as I age I will have something to say, and the courage to say it.” It would be the fulfillment of a calling: to combine my two joys – quilting and writing – to communicate the thing I care the very most about: spiritual and personal growth. Last year, I turned 75. Leading up to that milestone, I journaled a lot -- pages and pages analyzing my weaknesses and strengths, the past and the future, hopes and dreams. It was as though I thought at age 75, I would have figured out what life was all about, and all I'd have to do was relax and live it. And here I am, on my 76th birthday, telling you that no, I'm not done yet by a long shot. I’ve got more to learn. More to grow into. More changes to work my way through. So I turn to quilting and writing to do that. Hence, another blog. 75 has been a year of challenges. For some of you, what I call challenges would be minor inconveniences – amongst other things, a six week bout of sciatica for me, and the resident sweetie suddenly needing a pacemaker while awaiting surgery for a disintegrated hip. The orthopedic surgeon did not mince words; he told Al that he wasn’t a good candidate for surgery with his medical history, but the alternative was life with pain in a wheel chair. I felt like I’d been hit with an electric shock. This was reality. We put our life on hold and cancelled plans for the summer. Yes, it’s not cancer or dementia or all the things older folks fear, but for me it was a wake up call, and it hit me hard. Life the way we’d been living it was going to change, and change a lot and I wasn’t ready for that. (I’m such a naive crow, aren’t I?) We were moving from the territory of “young” old and into the next stage, if not “old” old, at least close to it. Questions overwhelmed me: how will we take care of our garden? Will I ever have long quiet satisfying days in my studio again? Will we ever camp again, travel again, walk in the woods together again, have fun again? I often found myself in tears, frustrated by little things that formerly were so easy, like hopping into the car for a drive or watching Al struggle to walk between the kitchen and the Lazy-Boy. One day, while taking a shower (a lot of good ideas happen in the shower!) I realized I should be working out this transition and its emotional impact in my art. In the studio I started sorting through fabrics, and found an old multi-coloured apron that had belonged to my mother-in-law.

I was reminded of her hard life. Born in 1906 on a farm in Holland, as a young girl she watched in horror as her farm burned down, killing livestock and horses. Later, as a young woman, she fell in love with a man who was “beneath her station”. Eventually, she did marry him, and there followed a few years of happiness. But her second child was still-born and had to be torn from her body. The girl baby was taken away, and there was no opportunity to mourn or grieve. Then came the war, fraught with danger, but she rose to the challenge by hiding those who were being sought by the enemy, even confronting collaborators and calling them out. Several years after the war, her dear husband died suddenly of spinal encephalitis. Three weeks later, she gave birth to her fourth boy (my resident sweetie). A widow at 42, responsible for raising four children, she took in factory workers as boarders, up to 10 at a time, providing meals and doing the laundry on the weekend when they went home for a few days. When her oldest son, who had been handling the family shoe-making business, decided to immigrate with his wife, she decided they would all go. Those early years in Canada were difficult years. Many times, she must have thought, “This is not what I signed up for.” Compared to her, I have it easy. And yet, she survived. What could I learn from this old apron, and from her life? I thought of the colours in the apron: red, for power and strength; black for death and pain; yellow for sunshine and joy; green for growth, blue for peace, variegated colour for family and community, white for hope, grey for drudgery and hard work. That plus more is all part of the ups and downs, the ins and outs, the joys and sorrows of life. And so I went to work, chopping up parts of the apron into confetti and sprinkling it on a background, not knowing where it would take me.

I added strips of colour, inter woven with the confetti, leading upward as though on a pathway.

Later, I added more strips of colour underneath the path, highlighting the many themes that are the foundation of our lives. We all walk this path; we all come across hard things; we all have to find our way through and move on.

Those coloured strips with their dangling ends could be potential blessings, or possible road maps, or bends in the journey. They could become the arms of our community that we lean on when times are tough. The work was helping me understand and accept the reality that was our pretty fantastic/oh so tough/happy/anxious/up and down life. I wondered what it was that kept mom going. What did she hang on to when she lost her baby, when her husband died, when she was all alone far from her relatives in a strange land? She never talked about it much, but she had a staunch Calvinistic faith, sturdy enough to hold her up, I believe. She was sure that she was not alone, that God was watching over her, that, as the Bible says, “All things work together for good...” On the night that she died, the nurses told us that a white dove sat in a tree outside her window for hours – an angel to watch over her? Perhaps. And so, I will need to add that theme of faith, as well, to this unfinished abstract piece of work. My idea is to add symbols, but that will have to wait till I can figure out how. And perhaps angel wings? And, now that I’ve wrestled with these ideas and learned from them, I will incorporate that understanding, again, into the spiritual and personal growth that is so important to me. (If you've read this far, thanks! I can’t think of a better way to spend a few hours on my birthday than to share my thoughts with you.)