Grief – Yarn, Books & Roses

Shuttle Pilot Days

My sister Selma sent me some of my favorite gifts ever. Beautiful plants, cute figurines, rice cookers, and great shirts all arrived on my doorstep sent by my sister. Two years ago, I tried to get back into weaving, but it didn’t go all that well. I used a table loom and even that was too much for my sad little hands. I had to use oxygen. I was feeling pretty down about the whole thing. Selma, forever unwilling to surrender to the hardships sent her way by life, sent me this tee-shirt. I packed it away.

This is a beautiful shirt, very comfortable and in my favorite color. It was a kind of a flop, however, because… scleroderma. I have a great floor loom that hasn’t been used for almost a decade. I can’t remember when I last produced something useful on a loom. I had kind of accepted that my days of weaving were over.

Then Selma died last summer.

Time to channel the indominable Selma, right?!! This Christmas I bought myself a little rigid heddle loom that I thought I might be able to manage while sitting in bed. Good plan, right? I used the practice yarn sent with the loom to learn how to warp and use it, and then I warped it up again with superwash merino sock yarn. Guess what? I can weave like crazy propped up in bed binge watching Netflex. Yay!

I finished the scarf this week and it is great! I am really happy with the feel and the drape. I bought a little fringe maker tool so I can make even twisted fringes with beads. Did I do this propped up in bed? Of course. I’m feeling pretty successful and I have already warped up the little rigid heddle again. Do I have visions of finished scarfs dancing in my head. Yep. Watch out yarn stash, I am coming for you!!

I also, in a moment of determined optimism, signed up for an overshot weaving class that would require me to warp up and use the floor loom. Oh, boy. Getting the loom warped and correctly threaded was… a lot. Just exhausting, actually, both mentally and physically. Eventually the warp was on and I could begin weaving. Yikes. This was a lot of work. There were problems with oxygen levels and sore muscles. I persevered, took a day or two off between weaving sessions, and slowly I became stronger and my breathing improved. I worked my way through the lessons online, clearly behind the rest of the class, and struggled to master the equipment and technical details involved in weaving overshot, a technique that involved weaving two fabrics interlaced with each other at once to create the type of designs in the pictures below.

Today I have finished weaving two of the major projects associated with the class, and I couldn’t be more pleased. These two placemats look different, but they are actually made from the same threading on the loom. The two looks (the left is called “star” and the right is called “rose” in weaving language) are created by changing the treadling sequence. Cool, right? My next assignment is to create a table runner that combines these two patterns together in a creative way. Yeppers! I am so excited to do that and have already half-way figured out how it will happen on the loom. I have new yarn picked out and everything. I am gaining energy and I can weave much longer at a time, and I’m not experiencing too many joint problems. Am I wearing my shuttle pilot shirt? Why yes, yes I am!

Selma would be so pleased to know that I am once again a shuttle pilot!!

After thoughts:

Selma sent me Swedish gingersnap cookies last year for Christmas. I bought another can and I’m now eating those cookies while I work at the loom.
Grief is a tricky thing. So is stress management. I have discovered that working at the loom, creating something beautiful and useful over time using repetitive movements, helps with both.
I’m thinking of joining the local weavers’ guild.
I have a really lush, healthy looking African violet plant that Selma sent to me one year. Is this plant blooming? Nope. This is kind of on point for my sister. When the time is right, I anticipate that it will produce blooms better than any other plant that I own.

Yarrow, Lavender, and Sage

The last day that I watered my garden was the first week of August. The days were hot and dry, and most of the flowers in my gardens were gone, but the yarrow, lavender and sage were shining in the early morning sun. “I should write a blog about the garden,” I thought to myself. Sitting on the swinging chair on my catio, drinking my morning latte, I took a picture of Hannah and a lavender plant to send to my son David.

The picture failed to deliver. The phone told me that he was offline.

I wouldn’t know it for a couple of more days, but my wonderful son, one of the best parts of my life, had died of complications of his type 1 diabetes. His loss has left a gaping hole in all of our lives.

That evening of the day that I found him, I took a bad fall while taking out some bags of trash from his apartment. Yep. I ended up in the emergency room.

Luckily I didn’t break anything, but I certainly was bashed up and I’m still recovering from the injuries. While in the emergency room I also picked up another gift:

There it is, my very first positive test for covid. I can hardly believe it happened. I was pretty sick the first week, and then the virus lingered on for two more weeks before I finally tested negative in the beginning of the fourth week.

Through all of this I have been pretty dysfunctional. I haven’t been able to read, or knit, or work outside in the garden. The grass has died, and the flowers are now all gone. I found myself unable to blog because I didn’t have any idea how I could tell this sad story, but I also realized that I can’t return to blogging without acknowledging what has happened. Today I am doing that.

This week I began to return to life. I picked up the knitting again. I sewed some zipped pouches to donate to my community action group: they will be filled with hygiene products and given to people in need through a program at a local hospital. I started collecting pictures for my son’s online memorial, and eventually I will return to writing my blog again. I’ve been contacted by some people who were worried about me, and I am sorry about that. Hopefully, soon, I will be posting again.

Here she is, the emotional support chicken that I knit for my son out of homespun yarns and red purchased alpaca yarn. I found her in tatters on his living room floor, all of the red yarn eaten by insects. Kind of fitting: broken heart, broken chicken.

I considered calling this post Loss, Grief, and Sorrow.

Forever more, that is how I will remember yarrow, lavender, and sage.

An Emotional Support Chicken Story

As some of you may have guessed by now, chickenitis is personal with me. Here’s our family story.

My nephew was a type 2 diabetic who had a rare, and very severe, reaction to the medication that he took to control his blood sugar last year. He sustained major organ damage at that time, the worst being to his kidneys and liver. He made lifestyle changes hoping that his liver would heal, but by this spring it became apparent that he would need a liver transplant. He broke the news to his extended family in a text message this April, and my sister requested that I make them all emotional support chickens. I pulled out some yarn and got to work.

Not long afterwards he went on a trip to Hawaii that was paid for through friends; the last picture I saw of him was a selfie taken while standing in the ocean.

A few days after that picture he was home again, returning early from the trip because his health was declining. Soon after his return he was in an emergency room, and two days later my sister let me know that his condition was critical and that he was nonresponsive. He did manage to rally and fought on for more days in the hospital, but when it became clear that his kidney function was too marginal to allow liver transplant surgery, he was moved to hospice care and arrangements were made to allow him to go home.

Shocked by the speed of his decline, horrified that the bottom had fallen out in the city of his mother’s birth, Honolulu, Hawaii, I bundled up the two emotional support chickens that I had ready to go and express shipped them to his home. I worried that they wouldn’t make it in time.

They did not make it. He died the afternoon before they arrived.

The next morning, I woke up to a text showing his swollen-eyed girlfriend hugging the chicken that I had knitted for him.

The emotional support chicken that I sent, hard at work.

It was heartbreaking, but I was grateful that the chicken had arrived for her right when she needed it, and happy to see she had claimed it. My sister kept the second chicken, the reddish-purple one knit from homespun, for herself. That chicken quickly became a true emotional support huggable. She took it with her for the memorial barbeque with his friends. She slept with it. The chicken traveled into the mountains on the day that they buried his ashes, along with those of a beloved dog, near a waterway where he used to camp. Raspberry brambles were planted on the site in living remembrance. In my mind, the color of the chicken is linked to the color of the future berries that will come from those plants. Bittersweet memories of a wonderful man gone too soon, a living memorial of berries, and a knitted chicken all somehow linked by the sorrow that has been placed to rest in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest.

The chicken went to another memorial gathering yesterday in San Diego with my sister and niece.

Emotional support chickens are just… cute little knitted chicken shaped pillows to hug. They are also symbols of love and support when you need those things desperately. They are something to cling to in bad times. Sometimes they are all a knitter can do for another person in need, and sometimes they are just what that person needed.

My nephew and I dancing at his sister’s wedding in 2002.

Now you know why I will never, ever decline a request for an emotional support chicken. Two more requests came this week. I have a spreadsheet and everything. For these people, in the memory of my nephew, for my sister, I will knit every single one of them a chicken.

I invite you to join me.

Knit on, my friends. Knit on.