selfishly

I finished piecing this yesterday. I had originally thought that this section would simply be the center of a larger quilt with several borders, but my thinking shifted over the day and I decided that I wanted this to exist as it does right now. I'm thinking that it might hang on a wall or eventually be a little play mat or crib quilt. I thought about sending it off to a friend, but then I realized--perhaps selfishly--that I needed to keep this for myself. I began it last april in the midst of a friend's struggle and I finished piecing it nearly a year later in the midst of my own struggle. It didn't quite make sense, then, as a baby gift for another. I worried that its energy might be too complex or too ambivalent for a child other than my own. Instead, I need to keep it as a reminder, a token, of my time and my trials in this little space. I'm machine quilting around random pieces of the top because it didn't seem quite worth it to hand quilt the top, especially if one day it will lie on the floor and be drooled on or tugged at. But we'll have to see about that in the years to come...

resurrection

Remember this old friend? Or rather, these old friends?

I thought about these year-old pieces as I lay in bed this morning. A dear friend gave birth to Alexandra at 26 weeks on Thursday afternoon after several scary days of pre-eclampsia. I keep imagining her in Boston and loving her at a distance. It's only February and it's already been a year of tremendous struggle for those whom I love. This morning I'm thinking about my Dad in the hospital after six weeks of chemo and radiation and now with a paralyzing back pain. He's gearing up for a major surgery on March 10th, but as he's wont to do, he's been pushing himself too hard, skiing too much, and now his body is resisting all the change. But how to convince a man who has sprinted through life to s l o w d o w n?

I took out these pieces for selfish reasons too. I put down my ragged copy of Stoddard's The Morgesons, a bizarre, otherworldly novel I'm teaching for the first time tomorrow. I set the microwave timer to 60:00 and let myself go. I needed to fall into these colors, to arrange and rearrange the parts. I needed to make space in my brain for something beautiful, something tangible and changeable. I needed to press pause on suffering -- ah, the luxury to do so --- and indecision.

When the timer rang, I had only worked out a few details at the bottom of one row. Now it's back to Stoddard and to worry and to the decision that's been in the front of my mind for nine days now. J and I are deciding between remaining in Kentucky or moving to Arkansas. We're deciding between his tenure-track job and one for me, deciding between the known and the unknown, between bits of nervous fear and bits of established comfort. We're deciding on the shape of things to come.