On My Own

Three weeks after surgery and I am on my own. The timing was just right. I took neither pain nor sleep medicine last night and was more comfortable than I have been even if I was awake and reading from 2:30 to 3:30. I aokeI su with energy and feeling firm on my feet. I even decided I was stable enough to step into the tub and shower with the hand-held shower head Leslie installed. WHAT HEAVEN -- the first time in a month I've felt water cascading over my body. Never ignore the bliss of such simple daily routines. I suggest just a moment to take a breath, feel the warm water and say "Ahhhh..."

Today was all my own, no appointments. I've been embroidering the butterflies' markings and making more and more butterflies for the show quilt. I have had misgivings all along but Saturday Leslie and I created an impromptu design wall, hung up the background and pinned on the butterflies that were altogether (not finished). We agreed I needed quite a few more but that it was going to work. The arrangement will be shifted and tweaked. So I've been making more, including having just finished two more today. -- About five hours to make two butterflies. -- Did I say this is a labor intensive quilt? Here's the empty looking first pass. It needs much -- which is exactly what I plan to devote my time to in the next several days.

Why am I subjecting myself to this exercise? Because these migrating monarchs are not just a bunch of butterflies; they are delicate, tiny, beautiful and perform an amazing feat every year, flying thousands of miles from Canada and North America to a wintering home in the mountains of Mexico. They do the seemingly impossible. ButI would not put this effort into something that was siimply an intellectual appreciation. There's a pesonal dimenson. Since a few days after the horror of 9/11 here in New York, they've been associated with that event in my mind and in a poem I wrote.
I was walking beside Hudson River walk below Riverside Parkwith Maggie. We were both enchanted by the numbers of monarchs we saw on the late roses along the path. A few months later the newspapers showed the monarchs in Mexico, killed in their hundreds of thousand by an unusual winter cold. Their death seemed to echo 9/11 -- but they have returned and rebounded. So this may look like a somewhat fussy, "sweet and pretty" quilt and if people see that, great. But it's more to me.
Now I'lll add a picture of one of Dottie Moore's quilts with a beautiful tree that I should have had in yesterday's blog when I wrote about her work.