stitches, objects and memories

ever since working on cleaning out our mother's house, i've been pondering things. the things we collect, stockpile, accumulate over a lifetime. the mundane things - bowls in which we serve dinner, glasses for milk, ceramic bulldogs, socks, tea towels...

i had some breakable glasses wrapped in the tea towel above for the trip home. the glasses are cheery ones from the 50s - with a pink check and a gold rim. i didn't notice that this tea towel had a careful hand-stitched repair of a hole until i went to iron it yesterday. and i welled up. mom must have sat down with it and carefully stitched a fine little oval-shaped patch into place. i find myself wondering when she did it. she couldn't have done it today. she's losing her words for things like needles and thread and while her fingers might remember how to make careful stitches, i'm not certain her mind could any longer make the connections necessary to do so. what made this particular towel worthy of repair? it is a nice, soft towel of the kind that are hard to find these days - the kind that actually absorbs water and which is soft enough to clean your glasses on and have them end up clean. that's part of why i used it to wrap up the glasses, i knew i would appreciate using it when i got home.

mom's house is full of objects and we donated, gave away, threw away and burned a great many of them. but there were things here and there that i wanted to save and take home - like these glasses and this tea towel. i'm not sure what to make of my choices. i don't particularly remember the glasses from my childhood. i think they are something she collected at a flea market in the years after i left home, so there aren't memories attached to them. but still, they spark joy (a factor my sister swears by after reading the marie kondo book). and it means something to have brought them home with me, across half a continent and an ocean. i feel comforted when i use them.

it is, in many ways, a situation without much comfort, this losing your mother to alzheimer's. i have been able to read about it a little bit now, but still haven't found anything that i feel like is the book i need. i think i deal mostly by avoidance. i don't call her much, because it brings it to the surface, hearing her repeat the same stories - the relocation of her cats to another zip code (as she puts it), the evil people who took her driver's license tho' she wasn't hurting anyone, the whereabouts of her (multiple!) guns - hearing her search for words and stumble around in her decreasing vocabulary. it's too raw and distressing. so i seek comfort in drinking my gin and tonic from cheery glasses she chose or fingering the mended stitches on a tea towel. and it hits me that the tea towel could have been my grandmother's and the stitches hers. and she also had alzheimer's and was eventually erased. leaving behind a mended tea towel, that i muse over at my own desk in my home in denmark, so far from where the stitches were stitched. and i wonder if objects can be repositories of memory. and if it will also happen to me...

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speaking of memory and objects, matisse found joy in things as well.

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an interesting piece on alzheimer's as a women's issue in the lenny letter.

a few of my favorite things

inspired by npr's favorite things piece, i give you a few of my favorite things.  1) little felted amanita by lisa. 2) the chicken-suit guy minifigure that started my whole minifigure madness. 3) herbert the bobbaloo by the fabulous kit lane. 3) my faces brooch by cathy cullis. 4) ohrid pearl earrings i got at lake ohrid in macedonia years ago. 5) my twiggy silver ring, made by a jeweler in frederikssund (where we used to live) and given to me for christmas by husband 5-6 years ago. 7) whirling dervish ink drawing from istanbul.

and this is actually different than my earlier likes/dislikes post. really it is. because these are things and some of that list was food. and feelings. and abstract stuff like queueing manners and the temperature of tea.

a big closer view of the rings and the earrings

why not share some of your favorite things too? it's actually rather fun to gather them up and arrange them and think about them. i was having a rather crap day, what with a facebook feed full of ignorant, racist, homophobic bible thumpers, the continuing refusal by post denmark to release our christmas presents and the grey, rainy weather. but thinking about my favorite things, plus a surprise lottery windfall of 3400 kroner (and i thought husband was nuts to create that online lottery account) and a lunch date later in the week with my new boss turned it right around. the weather may not have improved, but my mood definitely did.

please let me know in the comments if you do share some of your favorite things. i'd love to see them!

scenes from a sunday

motivated by the impending visit from my family i did a bit of decorating. the entryway has long been a repository of coats and shoes and the odd case of wine and not much else.

our favorite cupboard, which we bought in the early days of our relationship stands there, but was serving only as a place where i keep kleenex and batteries and hang all of my various purses and bike helmets and oddly enough, a feather boa.

but i vacuumed out the spiders and cleaned it up today and even unearthed some of our other favorite things...glass plates and vases from our early days together, a fish plate we bought in istanbul, ceramic fish and hens we bought in palanga, martini glasses from prague...

...a few cookbooks and an inherited ceramic apple. it was fun opening boxes that have stood patiently waiting for almost three years(!) and bringing out these beloved items. it made me happy and it also made me wonder why i didn't do it long ago.

they promised better weather and today was much warmer, but still not all that nice...it was a bit rainy in the afternoon and rather grey and overcast all day. i've been watching this little mushroom all winter. it appeared last autumn sometime and has been hanging onto that stump for months.

a fine mist of raindrops on the crocus. there are crocus springing up all over the place - it seems like there are more this year than there were before. but perhaps i just don't remember them all from last year.

the little chicks are at that scruffy, awkward stage. their mother parades them around, scratching up good bits and clucking them over to gobble them up. they're pretty shy and never stop moving, so it's a bit hard to get a decent photo of them.

husband tilled around the strawberries - we've got 8 rows and will plant two more this year, to have ten. i hope it'll be a good year for strawberries! that big pile behind husband is cow poo that a neighbor kindly brought by. our sandy soil quickly loses any nutrients it has, so we need lots of fertilizer. that giant tank in the background is the gas tank we found buried right next to our well last weekend. we had to have it emptied and dug up. husband intends to cut it in half and make a big grill with it. with him, that's not just idle talk - it's not far from word to action around here, so i'm sure we'll soon be grilling on a grand scale.

i hope your sunday was a good one too!