Gone are the Christmas decorations

As the holidays come to an end today, I have gathered up the Christmas decorations and repacked them in their boxes.  I reorganized my mantel which I decorate all year long as the seasons change.  It is covered now in icy branches and cones. 

I was at a lost for what rug to put in my shadow box since I have nothing yet hooked for January.  I went upstairs and rummaged through my box of old hooked rugs and came upon a little rug that is perfect. 

It is the only rug that my mom hooked for me.  She and my sister started hooking two years after I began the craft.  At the time, I was living in another state, so I never really got to hook with my mom before she died in '99.  The last year of her life, she designed and hooked Fawn for me and gave it to me for Christmas in '98. 

When I look at Fawn, I am drawn to the sweetness of the animal and the boldness of the flora she encounters.  I am also struck by the  the fawn as she stands alone, her mother nowhere in the setting.  The metaphor is not lost on me.  Only a few months after receiving this mat, I stood alone, my mother gone from this life. 

Yet the mat leaves me not with feelings of loneliness or abandonment as you might imagine, but feelings of strength and direction.  Like the fawn standing proudly on the bank, I can journey confidently in this world on my own.  This confidence was shaped in me when I was a child by my mother who loved me deeply.  So I am comforted by the mat, with the traces of my mother's hand that cut and hooked each strip of wool and worked her initials into the corner.  In this mat, she is still here and she has left me with a powerful message whether she intended to or not.

In this New Year, if there is a mat that needs to be hooked for someone, hook it and give it.  Our time with each other is shorter than we imagine.

Last Reflection on "turning" and memories of my mother

Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of my mother's death. On September 28, 1999, Gail DeConick died after undergoing a triple bypass surgery. It was a sudden and tragic death of a woman 57 years old who had not seen the birth of any of her grandchildren or her oldest daughter married. She was a person full of life, a joy to all who knew her, a woman whose family and our happiness was more important to her than anything else (including herself). She passed on to me her motherly wisdom which was rich and true, a sensible common wisdom that I rely on everyday of my life. She taught me not just to dream but to make my dreams happen. She believed in me even when I was having a hard time believing in myself. Her strength became my strength. After she died, I found myself looking in the mirror and seeing her standing before me. It struck me hard that she was living on in me, and at the time, this realization helped me grieve her loss.

Photo: me and my mom, twenty years ago!

A few years before her death, when I was still living around Ann Arbor, Michigan, she and I went on an autumn leaf hunt. We had just found an old orange coat at a church rummage sale, and we were so pleased with ourselves. What was I going to hook with this brilliant orange wool? We laughed together, saying "leaves" at the same time. So off we went, driving around Chelsea, seeking the perfect autumn leaves. She held the leaves as I drove to a local Kinko's were I placed the leaves on the copier machine and made photocopies of each one. When I got home, I carefully cut around the paper leaves, enlarging them slightly as I cut. These became the templates of the leaves in my rug Jack in the Red, leaves that now adorn the banner of this blog.

Jack in the Red is a big rug. It was almost too ambitious for me to hook at that time since I had only been hooking for a year and a half when I started it. It took me a while to figure out that I couldn't hook the leaves plain orange and plain red because they looked like blobs. So I experimented with splotchy (and sloppy, I might add) over-dyeing which I couldn't reproduce today if I tried. Who knows what I actually did. I sprinkled some burgundy and brown Cushing's dyes on red, orange, brown and plaid coat wools I had recycled. I studied pictures of how other people hooked leaves, and finally I figured out how to hook one leaf I liked using this variety of splotchy-dyed materials. I then tried to reproduce that leaf throughout the rest of the sixty leaves on the rug.

I didn't finish that rug until the summer of 1999 and only because my mother kept talking about that rug and how she couldn't wait to see it finished. By that time, I had moved to Illinois where I was teaching at a university, and I was at a stage of my life when I was very alone and struggling with that. So I spent many evenings in my apartment working on Jack in the Red.

In August, my mother called me and said that she had been having bad chest pains. She had to go in for immediate open heart surgery. I drove home the next day and spent a week with she and my sister before her surgery. We just went around doing normal mom and daughter stuff. We swam, sat on the porch and sipped tea, we ate out, we shopped. And, much to her delight, I brought along Jack in the Red which I had just finished binding. My sister and I had planned to attend Sauder Village camp the following week and put Jack in the Red on exhibit. But with her surgery, that plan fell through. So my good friend and fellow rug hooker, Robin Rennie, carted the rug down to Ohio and it was displayed there during the week of my mom's surgery.

My mom died six weeks later, never regaining consciousness after the surgery. Although I did not intentionally hook Jack in the Red as her tribute, that rug has become so over the years because it is bound up with memories of the end of her life and her death. Yet the rug is not a sad rug. It is a happy rug. It is about the life we lived together and shared with each other. About all those special moments in our common days together. Every autumn when I hang Jack in the Rug in my home, it reminds me of my mom and that lively and joyful autumn leaf hunt we shared on a beautiful crisp day in Michigan. It is a celebration of her life and our togetherness and all that she passed on to me as a mother and a friend.

It also reminds me of the swiftness with which life changes, with which it turns. That August and September were not only tragic and filled with loss, but it was also the moment in my life when I met the man of my dreams, whom I married a year later on August 5, 2000 - Wade Greiner. It was the moment that my life changed directions as swiftly as a blink of the eye. It was a moment that was pronounced both with loss and with love, and I really understood for the first time that life outlives death and that suffering and joy are reflections of each other. I realized that living is not really about the big things we do, the things that occasionally punctuate our lives. Rather living is about the little things we do with each other, the everyday things are what matter.