Beginning to Look Like a Chair

The wing chair is certainly looking more chair-like, but after three weeks of choosing needle and thread over long walks, I'm likely looking overstuffed too.  :)  Now that I've finished the patchwork part of the chair, I'll head back outside.  Around 5 a.m. this morning, after a long night working on this and determined to make it my last night of making patches, I finished the patchwork on the chair.  ♥

On a roll, I decided to keep going and cover the chair's [wings? I assume] and the strip under its cushion in the pink rosebud fabric I'd set aside.  And Stuffed, who had been barricaded from "his" chair most of the month, promptly jumped up and settled in for a nap as soon as I'd removed the last straight pin.  

I'm taking a break for a couple days while I plan out the rest of the fabric and rest my hot-glue-blistered fingertips.  The moment I added the rosebud fabric at either side, the chair looked like a true chair again and not so much like a wing chair I was in the process of maybe destroying by adding handmade patches to its back-rest.  'A bit of a relief, that moment.  I've never done this before, this revamping of a whole chair.  Cotton batting!  Needles!  Threads!  Upholstery trim!  Hot glue!  Limited lengths of vintage fabric pieces that really had to be measured-twice-cut-once. 

I'm beyond pleased.  Maybe I can someday sell chairs and couches redone this way, I was telling Mike the other day.  I could get a vendor spot at the flea market with my furniture pieces and maybe some pillows. . . .  I had already drafted a few versions of future business cards in my head when Mike snorted, "Yeah.  Just see if you can finish one chair first."  My mom and I have had an in-joke since first seeing Dirty Dancing ages ago that we break out in moments like this.  When lead dancer Johnny excitedly tells Neil Kellerman his ideas on how to "shake things up a bit" with the final show's choreography, Neil obnoxiously cuts him off as he begins to dance and says, "Woah, boy!  'Way over your head here."  Mom and I have adapted that to "Woah, girl!" and we say it to each other whenever one of us tells the other of her latest plans.  My business cards were definitely a "Woah, girl!" moment, but if I saw this chair at a flea market, I'd want it, so maybe someday. . . .It is always sweet to experience these moments that make you fantasize a bit and see a maybe-different-maybe-someday vision of yourself and of your life. 

Almost every--if not every--patch here has some personal significance, which makes it all the sweeter.

My grandparents' old chenille piece and one of their quilt-top pillow tops, hankies from friends and family, a scrap of fabric from chairs I'd sat on in my first apartment kitchen with Old Friend, curtains from my former room at my parents' house, a bandana Mom found me for my birthday a few years ago. . . .The three roses in the tiny square patch at upper-right below were attached to a cross pendant my friend Sommer gave me for Christmas our last Christmas together.  I saved the cross, of course, but decided to add "her" roses to the chair, so now my Som is there too.  ♥

The heart I made for the patch below reminded me more and more of my beloved Holly Hobbie as I worked on it, adding the rose, the stitches, and the orange trim above it, which reminded me of my dad, who still laughs at the fact that as a kid, I pronounced Holly Hobbie, "Hobbly Hobbly."  He still calls her that.  :)  I've found Holly Hobbie fabric to use elsewhere on the chair, and I'm sure a "Hobbly Hobbly" joke will be made by Dad when he sees it. 

Since most of my Old English Sheepdog things are still packed away at my parents' house, I didn't have any of my stash here to cut up for a patch, so I decided to try to make one.  The sheepdog below is okaaaaaay.  I did my best and gave it some grass and flowers to stand on, and I just said, "That's good enough" and moved on.  This has been a sweet project, but I'm also tired of it.  Have I mentioned I don't really even like to sew?!  The things we do for our visions.  :)  The white-striped dotted Swiss patch to the dog's right is one of the curtain-pieces.  The pink-dotted piece is the chair-scrap, and eagle-eyed blog readers will also recognize it as the fabric I used to frame my "Home Sweet Apartment" needlepoint. 

The coral-ey daisy patch and the one of the girl playing with her cat below are two of the only patches from the salvaged quilt-top I saved that I ended up using, after all.  Most of the girl-with-her-cat patch is covered by the seat cushion, but it was too dear not to use.  It is pretty threadbare and maybe wouldn't have survived being cut out and re-attached someplace else, so it's fine where it is.  The pink chenille at left was my grandparents'.  Gah!  I love this chair!  ♥

I also represented Stuffed with the heart-patch below made of the green dotted Swiss fabric I used way back in June 2007, before I'd even first met him, to make him his cat-shaped toy we've come to call "Girl Cat."  I paid a visit to Mike that summer bearing a backpack filled with homemade apple pie, peanut butter and chocolate birthday cake, and the cat toy for Stuffed.  A tiny green dotted heart now to remind me of it all.  ♥

The boy-on-the-beach/no-fishing patch above is one of the only other original quilt squares I saved from the old quilt-top I used as a grid for this.  Like the girl-with-cat square, it is threadbare and fragile, but we'll love it as along as it lasts.  It is too special not to save. 

Stuffed is content just to have access to his chair again.  And now I'll join him in it for a bit of rest.  ♥

Home Sweet Apartment ~ in Pink

Since bringing back from my parents' house the mantel my dad built for me and Mike last April, I've been painting it and fixing up the things that will surround it.  My treasured old "Home Sweet Apartment" needlepoint is the first piece I've revamped for the mantel-wall.  It was one of my very first eBay finds back in 2001, that most-miserable of years, and even though--or maybe especially because--I was unexpectedly living with my parents again at the time, I was thrilled when mine was the winning bid:  This vintage sampler, like a Field of Dreams-type "If-you-find-the-decorations-for-it-the-new-home-will-come" talisman,  gave me something concrete to work toward as a frustrated twenty-four-year-old.  

In the summer of 2002 when I finally had my first all-to-myself-with-no-roommates apartment, I delighted in unpacking the needlepoint and dolling it up, and what a year before had arrived pine green and maroon with an unfinished wooden frame became pink and aqua to match the little dining nook in my new place.  

"Home Sweet Apartment" behind me as I would sit in the corner seat under it there and work on school work for my second Masters program.  "Home Sweet Apartment" beside my newly-ex-boyfriend and I as we sat across from each other at this vintage tablecloth-clad table eating bowls of my homemade soup and awkwardly figuring out our post-breakup friendship.  "Home Sweet Apartment" above me as I bawled my heart out in this pink-dotted chair the following New Year's night after realizing we weren't ready to be "just friends" just yet and that we might never be able to in this lifetime.  The sampler over me and my mom when she showed up on a whim with two chocolate muffins from the bakery and listened as I made us tea and told her all about it.  The sampler over a whole bunch of us when I hosted both my first family dinner and first birthday party and relearned that as long as I had love to give--and gave it--I wasn't down for the count.  Before I moved out of this first "all mine" apartment, a former professor joined me for cookies and lemonade under the needlepoint and commented that I was good at making people feel welcome.  "Hospitality is your thing, isn't it," he thoughtfully noted.  And that's when "Home Sweet Apartment" really clicked for me:  I really had created a home here, not just filled and decorated a rented space. 

The pink and aqua needlepoint became a more subdued and not-very-Val-like red and yellow in 2007, so as not to overwhelm Mike with my pink-and-rainbow-loving tendencies.  Our studio apartment was so tiny, it was hard to do any real decorating in it at all, so the yellow and red actually didn't bother me too much.  When you can roll out of bed in your home-sweet-apartment and land on the kitchen floor, or open the bathroom door while sitting at the dinner table, the color combination of a sampler's matte and frame isn't your biggest homemaking concern.  Besides, the sweet sampler watched over me and Mike, this time hanging from the apartment's built-in mantel, during all our goings-on for four years the same as it had when it had been pink and aqua for me before.  Home was still love-filled and our favorite place.  Be it ever so humble, you know.   

Today it became pink again, though, and I don't see it changing after this.  It finally looks just right to me.  I covered the yellow matte with the dotted pink upholstery fabric that I had used to cover the captain chairs in my little circa-2002 pink and aqua corner.  I repainted the red frame black.  And I removed the glass-front since I don't trust this apartment's wall to hold its weight.  While I continue painting the mantel and fixing up the wall around it, at least this much is done.  That I figured out a way to incorporate the old chair fabric makes me especially happy.  

"Lighten up, Val--It's a sampler," I know, but when I look at it, I remember the journey it's accompanied me on and think of it as a witness to the past twelve years.  When Mike and I eventually move on from renting, I will pass it on to its next owners with a prayer for their own resilience and contented refuge in home.  

Sweet, indeed.  ♥

Sweet Autumn Weekend (or Val's Homebody Activities)

A sweet and simple fall weekend ahead:  Lunch with Mike in a few hours, a walk home through the leaves, and then a quiet night reading and catching up on my letter-writing.  These are what my ex-boyfriend used to call "Val's Homebody Activities."  :)  I gathered a bunch of especially pretty leaves this morning to include in the letters I'll be mailing Monday, and I've found both a sweet card for Aunt Laurie and the perfect anniversary card for my parents.  "Whenever we're together, blessings are served," reads Aunt Laurie's card, and the illustrations inside and out are of two bears talking over tea and of a flowers-and-pie-filled tea cart.  The Psalm verse "God has given us these times of joy" is printed on the inside, and especially since this will be the first mail I'll have sent her since our little gnome party three weeks ago, the card is perfect.  Mom and Dad's depicts one rabbit serenading another outside their cottages, and if ever a card looked like Mom, this is it.  Mom found me and Aunt Laurie sheets of autumn-themed stickers during our visit, and if I can part with them, they'll be on this weekend's letters soon.  (Pink Coneflower stickers!  Be still my heart!)  Cards and stickers are the only things I really enjoy shopping for, and I hit the jackpot with all these.  And tomorrow is Apple Cobbler Day because I'm hoping I can use it to bribe Mike into playing a game of Life with me.  I recently found the 1980s version of it that my brothers and I used to have, and I am willing to set aside Maple leaves and Chrysanthemum stickers long enough to fill a plastic car with pink and blue peg-people and then inherit a skunk farm.   (I always inherit the skunk farm.)  Sweatshirts, space heaters, and lap quilts on and rain all weekend.  These are my favorite kind of (fall) days.  

Flea Market Cat and the Year of (Not) Letting Go

While making my way through muddy paths and blustery winds at the flea market with family last weekend, I spotted this antique toy on a table.  I'm not one for knickknacks but fell for this simple old black and white cat, and after handing my eight dollar bills across the table to the elderly woman who was racing to cover the rest of her wares before the next rain, it was mine.  The older I get, the more I love the quote from William Morris that advises us to "have nothing in [our] houses that [we] do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."   This cat fits the bill for me.  I also love the advice to get rid of a few things for every one thing you bring into your home, so sometime this week, I'll be putting together another bag to donate to Goodwill.  A memoir of my mid-thirties would surely have a chapter titled "Clutter Be Gone."  Too much "stuff" makes me antsy.  Unless it's of books, I despise piles. 

At 24, I wasn't like this.  While discussing one of the "Hoarders" TV shows a couple weeks ago, I told Mike about the time I was shopping at a Salvation Army store in my hometown a few weeks after my family and I had finished cleaning out my grandparents' house and came across some of their belongings on the store's shelves:  My parents had donated to the store the items from Papa and Grandma's house that no one in the family had claimed.  I hadn't wanted these things before, but I suddenly felt sick at the thought of strangers owning the contents of Papa and Grandma's home.  I bought back all their books that I could find on the shelves, along with a porcelain swan that had always sat on top of their piano and that was now marked with a neon green price sticker.  My grandparents had just died in the two months before, and I wasn't ready to let go even this little bit.  Not ready at all.  I made peace with it eventually, and at some point, the books and swan made their way to the Salvation Army a second time, but I spent the spring and early summer of 2001 surrounding myself with boxes and piles of Papa and Grandma's belongings and berating myself for not having "saved" more of it from their house in the first place.  And what little money I was earning that miserable year and the next, I spent too much of on more "stuff" that further cocooned and comforted me.  One afternoon, the mailman delivered an embarrassingly tall stack of packages onto my doorstep only to return to his truck for a second stack--and in front of my younger brother, whose respect is chief amongst those I'd never want to lose.  It was easy for awhile to tell myself and others that I was just buying what I needed for my new apartment or "treating" myself after a hard year of too many disappointments and losses.  Although I was far from a hoarder, I was, in those heartbroken days of 2001 and 2002, surrounding myself with Any Little Thing That Would Make Me Feel Better, even if only by association--This "new-old" damask tablecloth is just like one of Grandma's--or because of misplaced hope--Maybe I'll be wearing this new sky-blue sundress the day my ex-boyfriend finally comes back to me.  I don't laugh at the people being buried alive by their possessions on TV shows.  Sometimes tablecloths and dresses mean so much more than tablecloths and dresses, and sometimes you need to hang on to them awhile.  Some peoples' "awhile" never ends, as those hoarding programs show us, and I feel sorry for them and their loved ones. 

My own "awhile" lasted about a year and a half.  By the end of 2003, I had donated or sold on amazon and eBay most everything that had before seemed so soothing.  I had healed some.  The vintage tablecloth wasn't necessary.  The sundress wouldn't be seen by the ex-boyfriend.  I would continue to remember reading on Grandma's lap as a child even if I gave away most of her books.  Papa and Grandma's house would still live in my memories after its foyer's porcelain swan found a new home.  Eventually, I just realized I'd be okay without it all and that I was, when it came down to it, okay without Papa and Grandma and the ex, as well (if I had to be, and God knows how stubbornly I struggle to accept a loss).  But what you need--all that you really need--I learned in those years, you carry within you.  Death cannot steal it from you, not really.  Goodbyes do not negate it, even when your present seems to have cancelled-out your past.  If the wooden flea market cat makes me happy, I enjoy it.  (It suits me, for sure, and it does look sweet amid the autumn leaves and little pumpkins.)  I enjoy it all the more knowing--finally and truly--that I'd be okay without it too. 

In My Heart of Hearts

In July of 2007, I was living with my parents and spending many hours walking. I had quit my job in June and was still a few months away from moving here and being with Mike and all that awaited me in this happier phase of my life. That summer was one I remember as the healthiest I've ever had: I had turned thirty a couple months before and would lose thirty-some pounds by year's end. I had so much time just to think, just to sort, just to go for my long walks around town, just to be. It was a sweet summer and still one of my favorite and most memorable ones. How often as an adult do we get that kind of extended free time and freedom? My bills were paid, I felt truly alive, I enjoyed my days, I had things to look forward to. . . .Life just felt good that summer. I felt good that summer.

One evening after returning to my parents' house from one of my walks--to the thrift shop and back was eight miles, and that was the biggest chunk of most of my treks that summer--I changed into a t-shirt and my beloved "dog bone" pajama pants and sat down at the computer, intending to email Mike before climbing into bed with a book. We wrote back and forth a few times, but I began to feel sick and just strange--sudden backache, my chest felt strange, I just felt strange. I remember mentioning to Mike that I wasn't feeling that great, but I assumed I had just somehow pulled a muscle or something--although how I would have done that during what had been an uneventful day, I had no idea--and before I could write again to sign off or explain, the pain in my chest got so bad I found myself in the bathroom deciding to try a hot shower. Maybe the heat will help. I must have really strained something in my chest. The pain got worse by the second, and the feeling of the water hitting my chest was excruciating. I turned off the water and stood bent over in my parents' blue bathroom for a few moments, trying to think of something else that might help. Maybe if I rub it? Maybe I pulled a muscle and rubbing it will help? Even the lightest touch of even one finger against my chest made me feel that much worse, though. I couldn't believe what I was feeling, and although this is a rather crass way of describing the pain, it was what came to mind at the time, as well: It felt like something was trying to claw its way out of my body from inside my chest.

I was soon doubled-over in my parents' bathroom, still wet from the shower but struggling back into a t-shirt and the pajama pants--skipping bra and underwear and just trying to get covered up because I realized I could very easily pass out from this pain and I didn't want to be found in my altogether. Just bending my legs into the pants and lifting the t-shirt over my head was agony like I had never even imagined. I would try to raise myself back to a fully upright position, and the very act of trying to straighten out my body made my chest feel like something was being pulled taut and about to snap inside of it.   OkaynomorestandingupVal! It was being squeezed tighter and tighter, and by then I couldn't breathe enough to call out to my parents or to make any sound at all--and I finally realized that I must be having a heart attack. And that if it was this bad and I wasn't able to call out for help, that I was likely going to die.

Before my "real" thoughts began, I thought that it was funny that I'd have a heart attack after I'd lost so much weight and adopted such a healthy lifestyle, and I was also glad that I would be found wearing clothes, even if it would be an "Attitude is everything" t-shirt and dog bone pajama pants. And I wished that there were a way to let everyone know what these final few minutes had been like for me. I wished there were a way to tell everyone, "Hey, don't worry about that. It hurt really bad for a few minutes, but that doesn't really matter." Because it didn't. I knew I was dying, and I just thought, "Well, some people get to pass easily, and some people have to experience some pain when they die. I got a heart attack." What I really wished, though, as I braced myself against my parents' sink that night, waiting, was that everyone I loved knew that I loved them. I thought of my parents and my brothers and poor Mike, still sitting there at his computer waiting for that "Sorry-I-left-you-hanging-like-that-I-decided-to-take-a-shower-to-see-if-that-would-help" email that would never come, and I hoped they all knew--really knew--that I loved them. I thought of Old Friend and hoped that when he heard the news that he would remember that I had truly loved him and that we had last parted on good terms. I thought of my niece and nephew and hoped they would grow up remembering somehow that I had loved them. I thought about my friend Sommer and how everyone would be shocked that she and I had both died so young--Som at eighteen and I at thirty--and how stunning it was to me that I was likely going to see her and my grandparents again in just a few seconds?! minutes?! I thought of everyone I loved and had ever loved and even the people I hadn't loved all that much, and I just wished them LOVE. It was all I could think about as the pain twisted inside my chest and now deep inside my back and shoulders too:  I love you, I love you all, I wish you love, it's all about love, I love you, love each other, it's all about love. There were no grudges or hurt feelings, and there was no anger or sadness or regrets or fear. I just wished everyone love. I knew that that was the key to everything and that everything was truly fine.   Just love each other. Love, love, love.

I don't remember what happened between those thoughts and my finding myself crawling from the bathroom into my parents' bedroom where my mom was watching TV, but I was now in front of her on hands and knees saying, "We need to go to the emergency room." She and my dad helped me into the car. . .Dad driving and Mom asking every few seconds, "Vally? Are you okay? Is it any better? Does it feel worse?" I stretched out on my back in their backseat watching the lights flash by in the dark out the windows around and above me. And somehow as I was shuttled to the hospital, I began to feel better. Whatever had been wound so excruciatingly tight in my chest seconds before seemed to be unraveling and becoming lighter. By the time I was answering the ER clerk's medical history questions, I felt fine. Tired but fine. The doctor assigned to me asked a bunch of questions and did whatever tests he did, and someone came in to take blood. An episode of "Jon & Kate Plus 8" was playing on my room's TV. I couldn't reach high enough to turn it off, so I got to hear them fighting [over the best way to store pine cones in the garage?!]. Eventually, the doctor and a nurse explained that I hadn't had a heart attack but instead just heartburn. Heartburn!? A near-near-death experience brought on by my first-ever taste of spicy brown mustard!? Mom and Dad were soon parting the curtains and saying they'd been told they could take me home now. Back into the July night air in my t-shirt and dog bone pants. Soon home and immediately getting in touch with Mike to explain why hours had passed since my last email. Taking the above picture of the Daffy Duck Band-Aid and pajamas that marked my ER visit. Sleeping with my bedroom door open that night so my parents could keep an eye on me. And knowing that something had shifted inside me that night that had nothing to do with stomach acid or muscle fibers.

The heartburn, if that's what it was, has never occurred again. My mom remembers seeing me crawl out of the bathroom toward her and doubts the diagnosis. Whatever it was that July, it brought peace with its pain. At a seminar in my field seven years ago, one of the speakers invited a volunteer to come join her at the microphone and tell us what she believed. That was the only instruction: "Would you please tell us what you believe?" I was awed by the volunteer's bravery as she listed item after item as though she'd known these things about herself forever and had expected to be asked about them. Older now, I myself could list some things off the top of my own head too, but I still don't know how many of them I would want to share with an audience. Something I can share without hesitating, though, is what I learned about love in July 2007: Love is The Most-Powerful. It is What Survives. It is Worth the Effort. It is What Matters Most. It Shows Up in Ways Big and Small. It is What You Can Take With You. It is--if not the entire answer--A Huge Part of the Answer. It is What You Need to Give. It is What You Need to Receive. It is So Much Bigger Than You Think It Is. Love, love, love. This is what I believe, even if it took spicy brown mustard to help me figure it out. 

Pine Needles

One side of my grandparents’ yard was a sloped grove of pine trees. When we were kids, my brothers and I would make elaborate mazes and forts out of the blankets of pine needles beneath the trees, digging and tunneling with our bare hands until the dark soil under them was exposed and we had created enough paths for a good game of chase in the shade. I never thought to take any pictures of our pine needle wonderland, but this favorite picture of Papa and Grandma shows some of the pine trees down the slope behind them.

And thanks to online mapping and its incredible “street view” feature, when I look up my grandparents' old address, I can see a bit of that same view from the opposite perspective, looking up the hill toward their house: The trees and their pine needle carpet and all of it in the shade that made it feel even more magical.

My grandmother died exactly five weeks after my grandfather, over Memorial Day weekend of 2001, and a week or so later, before the property changed hands and the new owners moved into the house, I made one last visit to my grandparents’ house with my then-boyfriend. After giving him an extensive walking tour of the mostly-empty house and yard, I asked him to lock the front door for me. While he did, I sat down on the brick steps of the front porch, breathing in those pine needles one last time, and fumbled around in my overalls’ pockets for a tissue that wasn’t already in wet shreds. Finding none I wiped my face on my his shoulder. “How do I leave?” I choked out. “How do I just leave now?” We never came up with any answer besides the obvious: You just do. You have to, so you do. What’s amazing, we decided that afternoon, isn’t that it ends and you find a way to go on, but instead that two people can love each other enough to create a home so good and so beautiful that their granddaughter would want to show it to one of her friends and tell him all about it.

Today after my run, I walked around my current neighborhood a little and stopped at a yard nearby with its own small patch of pine trees. And for the first time since that final visit to Papa and Grandma's house nine years ago, I bent down to separate a plush carpet of pine needles with my bare hands until a hole appeared. The neighbors, if they notice the hole at all, will likely suspect an animal had been digging there today, but they will never know how much that "animal" wanted to keep burrowing until an elaborate maze had been constructed in their yard. And call out to her brothers that it was ready and we could start the chase now. And laugh and shriek with them over every frantic slippery step that resulted in falling into a pile of pushed-aside pine needles. And look up every now and then, with pine needles and dirt in her hair, to wave to her grandparents as they smile down at her from the living room window.

As Old Friend and I headed toward the car to leave Papa and Grandma's house for the last time that day in 2001, I scooped up a handful of pine needles and a pine cone to keep at home with other treasures. Today before walking away from the neighbors' yard to walk home, I took only pictures. How do I leave? How do I just leave now? You just do. You take what you can and move on.