30 January 2011 - Friends and birthdays

30 January 2011

This has been such a hard winter for me in many ways. It has been cold. So far, out of the last 61 days we have had two days—2 days—where the temperature was over freezing. Mostly we hover in the low 20s, with wind chill measured in single digits. Cold. Gray. No wonder people go to Florida. I have lived in Michigan for thirty-one years now. This is the first winter I have truly understood the need to get out of Dodge and head south for the warmer climes. 

My siblings think I’m depressed. Maybe. But I think it is more a factor of the cold, the unrelenting grayness of it all than anything else. In addition to the gray, I get up in the dark and come home in the dark. How do I cope? I have been counting the light minutes.

I started keeping a daily chart of sunrise sunset times. On January 10: Sunrise 8:02 am. Sunset 5:19pm. Today, Sunday the 30^th,  the sun rose at 7:49 and set at 5:44. In only twenty days we have gained  37 minutes of light. I can’t even begin to describe how good that makes me feel. I am still getting up in the dark, but by the time I pull out of the driveway the world is light. No sun, but light.

The continual gray saps the will to do anything. I had big plans for Dec. Patch all the holes in the walls, pull down the wallpaper and paint. Here it is in the last days of January and I haven’t started yet. I get home in the dark and find that the cat, a book and the couch seem to be my best options. And it often digresses into really bad tv. I have even found myself watching the ubiquitous cop shows: NCIS, Without a Trace, and the ilk. What has happened to me? I think I’ll perk up with the longer days.  

The 27^th was my birthday and I received a huge surprise. Saturday morning I was out shoveling snow and I heard someone calling my name. I knew Karen had planned on stopping by. I had mentioned to her earlier, that my sibs thought I was depressed and not getting anything done. She said she’d come by and help me get started. Well, she came by, and surprised me by bringing Amy with her. They said they couldn’t let me spend a birthday alone. We had a wonderful girls’ weekend. Amy brought a huge pot of home-made cabbage soup and some wonderful bread. We ate, laughed, talked and caught up. We went to a quilt shop in Berkley where Karen found backing fabric for a quilt top she just finished for one of her three grandkids. 

From there we went to Leon and Lulu’s, a store I’d wanted to check out for some time. It was even better than advertised. Housed in a historic roller skating rink, it is now a mecca with one of a kind pieces for the home. From furniture and lamps, to art and artful clothing, it was just amazing. We closed the store. Then off to Empire Dynasty for Chinese. Yum! What a wonderful way to end birthday month. There is just nothing like old friends. Karen is a good forty minutes away, living in Hartland and Amy is four hours north up in Gaylord. It was a treat.

The funniest story from the weekend was about quilts. In August of 2009, Karen’s youngest daughter, Erin, was living in North Carolina. Her apartment building was hit by lightning and burned to the ground. She lost everything. Amy and I decided on the spot that we would make her a quilt. It took us almost a year for the process of deciding on colors and fabric, followed by designing the pattern, splitting the fabric, sewing blocks, and laying it out. We used up almost every last piece of fabric as the quilt became larger than we had planned. We had some interesting moments trying to make do with the small amounts of fabric we had left. The quilt was all in batik in lovely purples and oranges. It looked like a wild sunset. 

The joke was that they would have to pry it out of my hands to give it to Erin, when it was finished. I, however, thought they would have to pry it out of Amy’s hands. After we gave the quilt to Erin I had the bright idea that I would use the last of the scraps of fabric and make a small commemorative wall hanging for Amy. It would be my Christmas gift to her.  

Over the last couple of years the dining room has been taken over by my sewing machine, fabric, and projects. I had a paper box lid with all the scraps from Erin’s quilt. When the time came for me to start the wall hanging I was dumbfounded. There was nothing left! I could hardly come up with enough fabric for two small blocks. I went through my piles of fabric over and over again. I was so sure I had more. I did make Amy a keepsake. It was very small. At Christmas when I gave it to her, I told her how shocked I was to discover how little fabric I had left, when I was so sure I had enough to make a decent sized wall hanging.

You can imagine my surprise when Amy gave me a Christmas present… a wall hanging made from scraps of the fabric left from Erin’s quilt.  It turns out that last fall when she spent a weekend with me, she snatched up a handful of scraps from the dining room table every time I left the room. Sneaky! So sneaky, and so not Amy’s style at all. I think Karen and I have been very bad influences on her. But her quilt—um, my quilt is just gorgeous. It isn’t quite finished, so Amy took it back—just as I took back the Christmas keepsake I gave Amy, which needs to be quilted. I am still laughing about this. 


 Here is a photo of the wall quilt Amy made for me out of the scraps. She calls it Zinnias Outside My Window. Zinnias are one of Amy's favorite flowers. She had a big bouquet on her table while she was sewing this together. It occurred to her that the blocks looked a lot like the zinnias in her bouquet. 

It is wonderful. It has the feel and fabrics from the quilt we made for Erin, but it is entirely new.