Hello!

Okay. So I'm getting addicted to Facebook, and therefore I've been absent from the blogosphere. Plus, it's been a hell of a last couple of weeks. But I'm hopeful with the more frequent sunlight and delighted with other signs of spring (see sweet Montgomery in his patch of sunlight), so I'm back. I've missed this space!


Work has been crazy. I don't even know how to get into that, so I'm not going to. But the biggest thing that's happened for me is my grandmother Rosemary's death a couple of weeks ago. She'd been in the Foley Nursing Home, and truly - she'd been extremely unhappy since losing her eyesight, and endless bouts of pneumonia left her weaker each time and suffering. This last time, she didn't fight back from it. She didn't want to. I miss her terribly already, but how can I say I wanted her to live for ten more years when her quality of life had been so drastically reduced? I am filled with questions I wish I'd asked her, conversations I wish I'd initiated, things I wish I'd told her... This is my first real experience with losing someone so close to me.

This is hard to write about. Nothing I write does justice to what I feel, or what I really want to say. So...... I'll write instead about the dry sink I inherited from Grandma, which had first been my great-grandmother Laura's. Possibly it's even older than that - I have to check for sure. I have a picture of it below - - - It's in Adam's and my bedroom, and I'm using it as a vanity. It's already been quite useful, since usually Adam and I fight over use of the bathroom in our rushed weekday mornings. But best of all, it was Grandma's. I bought a beautiful red velvet bench yesterday from Grandma's Attic, and a pink lamp. Grandma LOVED the colors pink and peach, and nearly every afghan she made and decorating scheme she used involved them. So it makes me feel closer to her.

The yellow Post-It note was in Grandma's cookbook, which was set out at her funeral/luncheon because she loved baking so much. It says, "Shoots (my aunt) wants this book, because my hands were on it. I ripped out my sweet roll recipe and apple dumplings. Hi you all. Love all of you. Mom." With her trademark smiley-face sun.

She'd written that when she had to move out of her apartment and everything was getting packed up and distributed to different people, but reading it at her funeral......To me, it was just like she was talking to us. It was comforting.

----------- Big change of subject, but - I need to go wash clothes because my washing machine is finally fixed. Who knew I'd be so excited to do laundry, but now that I don't have to re-do the spin cycle at least twice before putting the clothes in the dryer (they would be sopping wet after a load), I'm happy.

Hope all of you are well! Enjoy the sun.