Wonderful to have flowers in the dead of winter

This gorgeous  star gazer lily is part of a big bouquet I was given ten days ago.  There were beautiful white tulips which did not last beyond 5 or 6 days -- they just quiety dropped all their petals on the table.  But the bouquet contained several stems of lilies with unopened buds. The first open lilies are gone. This is one of the second flowering. I think I may be lucky enough to enjoy a third flowering. What a pleasure when it is white and cold and wet outside to have such color to look at on my dining table!

They were given to me at the launch party for Reflections, the anthology by and for members of the Academy of Lifelong Learning. With a committee of six, all well versed in grammar, punctuation and good writing, I spent some nine months -- yes, a normal gestation period -- editing and then arranging, adding illustrations to the work of 47 people, poetry, nonfiction and fiction as well as some photography.  The work is indeed a "reflection" of the experiences, concerns and thoughts of our population of senior course coordinators and students. It's been a pleasure for me to work on the anthologies for the past four years.   The books are handsome and very readable.  I'm feeling rather proud.

Honesty -- yes! Honestly.

Back when pasmina scarves were beginning to be in style -- I mean the real thing, not some thin synthetic imitation -- I was in Kathmandu and purchased two, one red, one a soft aqua. I bargained for them and finally paid $40 each. Back home they were selling in posh stores for $200 and up.  This was about 12 years ago, imitations are rife, but they are not as warm or as plush. I have enjoyed those scarves greatly, they are matched only by a black alpaca scarf I purchased in Cusco, Peru which is somewhat warmer. I believe it was also $40. 

It's cold here on Cape Cod in this brief hiatus between unprecedented blizzards. I have been wearing my warm scarves and enjoying them. Wednesday I wore the aqua scarf to an event at Cape Cod College, hung it on a hanger with my coat and earmufs. I was both the organizer and the speaker at that event, my nervous tension was about as high as it gets and I basked in some very welcome compliments.  I was distracted at the end of the event, had to straighten the room, return coffee pot and other items to another building. I put on coat and earmuffs and didn't think about the scarf for three or four hours. Then I realized I didn't have it. That was Wednesday evening. I was very busy with a grathering at my house and then a class (not at the college campus) in the afternoon. The scarf floated in and out of my attention. I had had it for a good number of years, I had enjoyed it, I had other scaves, I was not sentimentally attached to it. But it's a lovely scarf, I would miss it.

Today I was on the campus. The scarf was not in a lost-and-found  but I wondered if it could possibly still be on the rack where it had been left. I went to that building -- lo and behold! There it was, hanging just where I left it. Could  the students here be exceptionally honest?  I think they are. And I think they are also unsophisticated, no one recognized that this was, indeed, a very fine scarf. After well over 25 years living in NYC, I can only think finding my scarf just where I left it, is an  exceptional indication of a combination of honesty and lack of greed as well as fashion ignorance. I am happily reunited with my aqua scarf. And I have washed ashore in an exceptional community.

No plan, what am I doing?

 The pile of assorted purple scraps is dwindling as I make square-in-square pieces from it and add them to the growing pattern on my design wall.  I've seen art quilts made a similar way, I remember an all green one and a few that are yellows and reds. Some were made by Carol Taylor.  I liked what I saw and I've been thinking about doing something of the sort.  So that's what I've been doing. They are not all the same size and I'm not sure how I'm going to sew them together. I'm not sure how big the piece will become. For the moment it's a little like doodling. 

There are any number of more usual patchwork block quilts I'm thinking of making, some in the "Modern" vein, especially since I seem to have accumulated a lot of white that I could use in modern quilts.  But for now this improvazational method is working for me. And I'm wondering: what next?