Tying Summer’s Loose Strings

I propose that this week is Fall Cleaning Week. I’m taking inventory of all postponed summer projects and I’m going to obsess over them for the rest of the week. Like this one. One day, after piecing together a few squares, I hung it up in the studio. It was nice to watch the light pass through the colored fabric. Then Chas started peeing on the nasturtiums and I got distracted. I let it hang the rest of the day, which became the rest of the week, which became the rest of the month. And there went summer.

I’m not ready to let this quilt go dormant till next year. I’m finishing up this beach quilt because, here in northern California, it’s still sunny, and I’ll always be able to go to the beach, and grow beautiful flowers in the wintertime; which means, ofcourse, that I’m rationalizing. Mostly, though, I just want more frilly flowers in this house because I’m outnumbered by 5 males. And sometimes, like yesterday, I just want to doodle flowers everywhere.

Ford and I were drawing garden mandalas together on Sunday. Oh, obsessions! Ford is now on mandalas. Everything mandalas. While I pieced together the rest of the quilt today, I helped him start embroidering a mandala that he’d drawn on a fabric scrap. It really made me happy, watching him patiently stitch and breathe, quietly. Because he is never so quiet during the day. Ever!

Afterwards, he came up to me, very matter-of-factly, to tell me the entire contents of his dream last night, about otherworlds and death and a omnicient supercomputer…big stuff for another post, another day. For now, the fascinating dream is dutifully transcribed in my otherjournal, because there is a quilt to finish! And I mean it, this time!