Revisiting my life

 

Creative spoils from last week.

A big LOL needs to be attached to that title. I'm home, glad to be here, but in two and a half weeks my hubby and I are getting away to spend time with friends who graced our lives last December. This is a year for travel, at least for me. My better half isn't overly keen on leaving Humboldt County, but I'll take his vacations days and run with them.

Blocks up close: Ice Cream Soda.

For now I'm ensconced in my residence, maybe even wholly unpacked. Laundry is going, trinkets out and about, including a new (cheap) clock from IKEA that I'll transform into a fabric extravaganza. However, currently I want to extol the virtues of time away from one's routine, EPP blocks sewn in my absence, and how transitory my life feels, not merely because in another two weeks I will again pack a suitcase and kiss my usual existence so long.

Hexie Flower, one-inch pieces.

It's a fairly long-ish, but thankfully once out of the SF Bay Area uneventful, drive home. I left my eldest daughter's house yesterday around eight a.m. and was on the Golden Gate Bridge less than an hour later, Sunday mornings a good time to hit 19th Avenue (also known as Highway 1). I've traveled over that bridge a few times, always impressed by the massive orange towers, but when doing the actual driving, I tend to pay strict attention to the road, staying in the middle lane, not really relaxing until I've reached the Robin Williams Tunnel. After that, even with multiple lanes of freeways until you reach Windsor, Bay Area traffic feels less of a burden, more like a minor irritation. Once I reach Healdsburg, traffic seems to disappear, two lanes each way until Willits, with the exception of Hopland. After Willits, one lane each way intersects with proper freeways amid towering Redwoods and other beautiful landscapes. I love driving, which is fortunate. I certainly prefer traveling by car than plane, perhaps I'll add, and am grateful for the peace which surrounds getting to and from various locations dear to my heart.

Another Ice Cream Soda block.

And then as suddenly as it felt packing to depart, here I am with my husband, in our house, as though that visit was a figment of my imagination. Yet the memories are vivid, English paper pieced blocks gracing my office table.  Ice Cream Soda blocks come together pretty quickly, with three little hexie flowers sewn at the end of my sojourn. All of these are pretty uncomplicated, no fussy cutting. Merely fabrics I like, values alternating, prints as well. My style of sewing, quilting, and EPP'ing isn't fancy, but it makes me happy, and isn't that what life is about?

Hexie Flower!

That's what I pondered on yesterday's drive; how my writing isn't flashy, not the latest genre-craze. It's my life's blood, I will say, or one of the elements. It's never going to be blockbuster-style, but just to write, then release my novels is pretty damn cool, and I'll keep doing it until I run out of plots to enhance.

I'll keep sewing the same dang way.

I don't know how the gardening will evolve this year, although marigolds have sprouted, maybe a few cosmos, as well as carrots, beans, peas and oh my goodness the lettuce seeds went CRAZY! I think we'll put the carrots and lettuce straight into the ground, but the rest will be transferred into small pots. The seeds were all started in peat pellets, so it will be fascinating to observe how the carrots and lettuce acclimate while the rest snooze in safety a little longer.

Ice Cream Soda, with an ode to Van Gogh's "Starry Night" as the main print.

This year isn't about writing, or not yet. It seems to be about dabbling, be it in hobbies or the homes of others. It feels like a transitional set of days, weeks, and months, but I'm not sure to what I am leaving or moving toward. Crafting fiction and quilts isn't being abandoned, yet my grasp of them is, well, not tenuous, but kinda fleeting. Or altering in some way that might be related to edging toward my sixties, although that's still two years away. But in nearing fifty-eight, and spending a copious amount of time recently with those much younger, the notion of getting OLDER is stark, mostly in a grandmotherly manner, but also in a I don't have the same energy levels as my daughter and her friends or the grandgirls, lol. Which invariably translates to: I am perfectly happy writing stories for myself and whoever might find them online as well as making quilts that aren't social media stars but serve their purpose with subtle yet pretty intentions. This springs from what happened last year, losing a beloved far too soon, as well as feeling content in my own life to create without the need to shout all about it other than on this little blog.

A little Anna Maria Horner brightens this Hexie.

Because if I really craved obscurity, I wouldn't be going on about all this stuff on the World Wide Web. Which could be a post of its own, but lunchtime beckons, so I'll end this here, content with my life, a treasure all its own.