Like a Patchwork Quilt

A beautiful song, one of my all-time favorites, is running through my head this morning – Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Patchwork Quilt. It’s about the AIDS quilt, and I’ve never once listened to it without a tear in my eye. I wish I could find a link to stream it for you.

My heart spills over, flowing with tears.
I cry for your suffering and for your shortened years.

Critter has been asking to make a quilt out of S’s t-shirts. I’ve been stalling, just couldn’t muster the energy. For whatever reason, I woke up at 6:00 this morning ready to do it. I wasn’t even sure where the shirts were, so it took some digging. By 7:30, we were unpacking the box on the family room floor when something entirely unexpected happened.

Our increasingly cranky 12-year-old mutt, Zoe, immediately came over to the pile of shirts and sat on it, whining. She nuzzled her nose into the shirts then put her paws on me over and over, like she wanted me to do something. It was heartbreaking.

As I start this project, I’m thinking of my middle school sewing teacher, Mrs. Pennypacker. I have no idea how old she was at the time, but I do know that her husband died while I was in her class, and that he was too young to die. She talked about it when she returned to school. She wore his ring on a chain around her neck. She told us that the doctor had prescribed sleeping pills, but they turned out to be placebos. I had to look up the word.  She was probably the first young widow in my life, and I watched as her life went on.

And now I send her blessings, wherever she is, as I use the skills she taught me to sew together some memories for my daughter.

The feel-good movie of the year

My body decided to stay home from work yesterday. After a nap to recover from driving Critter to camp, then watching daytime television for about 18 minutes, I decided to look for a movie on Netflix. The home page boasted a category created just for me: Understated Dramas Featuring a Strong Female Lead.

I burst out laughing.

When it's all over, I would love for my life story to have been interesting enough to hold a viewer's attention. It certainly had its tense moments, but the redemption in the second half and the happy ending made it the feel-good movie of the year. Not a big studio production, but one of those quiet indie cinema verité flicks, maybe shot with a hand-held camera. Understated.

I wonder how many other people's "just for you" categories so perfectly describe their innermost desires for their own lives.

The Village People

I’ll dispense with the self criticism about how long it has been since I have written here, and instead confess that the impetus for starting again is the guest post I wrote for my friend Kristi’s new blog that will be accompanied by a link to this one when it is published sometime soon.

The timing couldn’t be worse, really, because I don’t like to be a whiner. But I am sick. And in my still-newish life as a sole parent, few things get me down more than being sick. A pox on the houses of my coworkers who have been coming to the office and spreading their filthy upper respiratory crud.

My eyes are burny and watery and twitchy, I’m hot and cold all at once, my head is pounding and I want my mom to make me some soft-boiled eggs. I want to lay on the couch and watch the televised results of paternity tests. I want another adult living here, because although I boldly declared myself off-mom-duty three hours ago, I eventually took pity on Critter and boiled some frozen ravioli for dinner.

Yet for all of my whining, I’m really not alone. A friend’s offer to go to the drug store or pick up groceries or just visit brought tears to my eyes. When I told Critter she was on her own tonight and she asked me how she’d get dinner, I told her that calling Kristi was probably her best bet. I was kidding, but it’s true – with one call, she could have been eating a far better dinner with far better company. In fact, she could knock on the doors of several neighbors and easily scrounge up dinner on any given day.

I am so grateful for the family of friends we have found here in Tampa. I’ve been using the term “sole parent” because “single parent” sounds more like a marital status than a state of being. I think, though, that I need to come up with something new, something that involves the word “village.”