This day began in beauty. A warm bright sun, birds singing, the air smelling as sweet and fresh as I have ever noticed. Tulips bloomed in my front flower bed along with the long dormant heather nestled beside the alder tree. We strolled the beach on Marrowstone Island after a wonderful family breakfast, all three of us at the dining room table, something very difficult to do with our busy schedules.

A driftwood collection, soldiers at attention.

The beach.

One person's route from bluff top to beach.

Otter having lunch and play.

Ravens varnished, drying in the sun.

The late afternoon was spent in the studio making a few things for the shop and alternatively speaking with the neighbor about lawns and trees and dogs and other neighborhood things. After 17 years of living in this place, we only know most of the neighbors enough to wave a quick hello but Larry is our neighborhood sage, a wealth of local knowledge and story. A trip into the shop tonight to tidy things and then on the drive home stopping to watch the neighborhood deer walk off into the tall grass where they sleep at night. A full moon beckons to me, making me awake to all the sounds the night brings. It is difficult to call the day an end, wanting to stay up and do and make and knit but my body says sleep. An end it must be called and off to perhaps dream a plan for tomorrow's studio day.

Earrings made today.

So with most things, paint and beads must be put away. Sunshine is due tomorrow and I have plans, pretty firm plans to sit somewhere in the sun and knit.

Once the sheets of rain and fierce winds stopped blowing, the day turned itself around and became a sunny one, full of balmy spring like air. Propping open the front door brought a smile to my face and a hum in my heart. Although I really consider myself a fall -winter kind of person, I am looking forward to the longer days of spring and summer when the light extends further into the evening and I can be outside. Taking a walk, drawing on the porch, knitting in a lawn chair as evening descends from the sky. I already feel myself relaxing as warm airs becomes my comforter and I am so looking towards those days and evenings.

I am sitting here tonight, tired after a long day at the shop, particularly tired after the stressful day, first day back at the shop yesterday and thinking of my eyebrows. That they are nearly non existent. So many things going on in the world and all I can think of are my eyebrows. I used to have nice thick brown ones. In my high school graduation picture, they adorned my face like friendly caterpillars and by the time I was done with college, they were smaller, lighter in color, I thought maybe sun bleached. Honestly, I have not plucked an errant hair from them since high school. So tonight I sit and realize that in certain light, in spite of a soft brown eyebrow pencil, I really have no eyebrows. I miss them. My face misses them. Oh well, this aging thing does take us to places we never thought we might go.....

Things have really jumped ahead here and I find myself getting ready for the big Tucson shows. This will be my 20th year as a vendor and my 21st, attending the shows. This is also a decision year as I make the great leap and decide whether I will continue to do the shows, take a break or sell my charm business. I am restless and older and after my brother Bob's death recently, I am looking at things differently. Maybe it is just because it is January, that I am in this period of reflection. I have put all these thoughts out to the universe and am listening, very carefully, for an answer. There is no hurry. I am just waiting...
In the meantime, here are a few bracelets I have made for the show. I am calling them " treasured charm bracelets " because they are a bit of everything. Everything I love. Everything I send out to the universe with my energy and faith.

It is almost Christmas. Rain is coming down in a steady pour and the back porch rainspout is making its usual racket of drop, drop, DRIP, drop. The tree is up and lit, the evergreen scent fills the living room air. Christmas icicle lights strung across the front porch roof shine into the room and I can see the bright colored lights that sweep the garage roof from where I sit in this leather chair. It is nearly time to call it a day. The house sits quietly in anticipation of Christmas morning and the afternoon dinner that follows. We are older now. Our children scattered to the different corners of the country. One child remains at home, much to his chagrin he is not yet the adult he has wanted to be since he was born. We are but a stop in his busy day, a place to eat and sleep.

Christmas makes me sad and wistful, happy and content all at once. I am blessed to have this life I lead, the family I have and the work I love. My days are full with creativity, my needs are met, I am surrounded by people I enjoy. Still the sadness creeps in. I miss my family, the family that was while I grew up. My Aunt Lou, my grandparents, parents and siblings. I remember the excitement of waiting for presents and company to arrive. The Christmas tree, always brightly lit and fully decorated in the corner of the living room; created a hiding spot where one child in a big family could hide and enjoy the quiet of being lost in holiday ornaments and lights. All those people that I so long ago loved - gone. Memories linger and if I sit long enough and quietly enough, closing my eyes tightly; I can see them again. Summoning the feelings of those long ago childhood memories, places and people.

Happy Christmas to all and sweet blessings, too.

Recently the shop received in some market quilt squares in little sets of precut fabric that featured fruits and veggies. I loved the colors and every time I walked by the display, I thought I am going to stitch those together for shop samples. Mind you, other than some free form wool felt work and a banner or two, I have not sewn in almost 20 years. I don't really know how to sew, much to my Aunt Gertie's chagrin as she tried, really tried, to teach me and so did my high school. That was way back when home economics was taught to all girls in school, preparing us for our future just as feminism and the ERA was beginning to make some impact.

Anyhow, as I sewed these pieces together in my sunny classroom a few months back; I remembered my grandfather telling me how his mother sewed patchwork quilts at night before she went to bed. He said she would cut the squares from whatever fabric was around, old clothing, flour sacks or curtains and would stack the squares in her sewing basket. She would then begin to sew and he described how she would first sew two by two squares, then four by four squares and kept combining them until she had a quilt top. All sewn by hand. All stitched as part of caring for her family, using everything in the thrift she practiced her whole life.

As I sewed that Sunday afternoon, I thought of my grandfather telling me this and pictured his mother doing this handwork into the quiet evenings. I felt the generations of my family surround me, observe me, sit with me as I worked on this craft with the use of a sewing machine. Timelessness flowed through my mind and hands. Love for my grandfather and this story that all these many years later, still resonates within and about me.

p.s. Please note in the funniest way possible, that the veggie squares have in them french fries and tortilla chips!!! Very healthy fresh veggies, don't you think? I am laughing here!

My breath catches in my chest. I am paralyzed with a sadness that I did not know was coming. My brother, the man I only met briefly at our father's funeral in 1983 and not again until 1995, has passed away. Suddenly. Unexpectedly after a brief, vicious bout with lung cancer. Damn lung cancer. Damn all cancers.

He didn't tell me, my sister in law said, because he did not want to spoil my trip to Paris. He was thinking of me. This was his way, silent, stoic; much like our father.  It was a loving and kind thing for him to do and that makes me cry even more. I am a bundle of nerves and emotion. smiling because of this act of love, crying because I will miss him. I liked having a brother who looked like me. Who had memories beyond mine and different than mine. He knew my mother before she was married to our dad. He had different stories to tell of both my mom and dad. He had a life's story far removed from mine as he grew up far away in remote Alaska and I in the countryside of Pennsylvania. He dreamed of retiring there back where our whole family began. He was going to make a trip to Pennsylvania and reacquaint himself with the memories and place of his very young youth.

It is different to get to know your brother as an adult. Your backgrounds are complete, you are joined by genetics only. A friend insisted that I reach out to him, decades ago when on a trip to Alaska. I was hesitant, not sure if he would want to meet me. He was the last surviving half sibling I had. We met in a restaurant. Had dinner and found we were so much alike. We told stories. We talked about our father. I kept wanting to reach out and hold his hand, he being so much like the dad I both loved and feared.

We met every so often over the next bunch of years. I took Phil and Jacob to Alaska to meet him. I delighted when Jacob liked him and nearly passed out with delight when Phil said we looked alike, acted alike and even spoke words the same way. Our mannerisms betrayed us as siblings even when our lives didn't let us live as siblings. I had a fuller heart. I had family. Someone I could begin to build a past and a future with.

I am blessed to have had these times and memories with him. To have met one another and known each other. To be happy that all along he had followed me through my blog and achievements, that however briefly we were brother and sister.

Still I am sorrowful in my loss. Now, I must figure out what to do with his absence and maybe I will have to make that Pennsylvania trip to see for him what he has missed. Maybe this is the push I need to mend fences with other siblings however painful that journey may be. I have already spoken with my other brother, the brother of my youth and felt comfort in his voice. Maybe in this ending there is a beginning.