Risks Take Rake omg....

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Hexie basted earlier today.

Today's title isn't a typo, but how my eldest responded on a family text thread this morning. You could also say it's apropos of how all in my clan are grappling with last week's disturbance in the force. Heads-up: this post may be littered with random well known and intimate familial sayings. Risks take rake omg could well become shorthand for various WTF acronyms. Feel free to adopt any and all that fit your situation.

Today's forecast is for continued shivers and the occasional tremble, especially when photos of the recently deceased pop up on one's screensaver. There aren't enough words or pregnant pauses to adequately describe what my crew is attempting to digest, and that doesn't include my sister-in-law, suddenly a widow. I can't fathom her heartache, she can't really either. Says she's not thinking about it much, except when it steals over her. Or I assume that's a drop in the bucket, the writer in me. Or maybe it's me, attempting to focus on hexie flowers or repairing a blown-out knee from my eldest grandson's jeans. We can make them stronger, faster, a fabric-bionic knee replacement inside and out. The soundtrack is courtesy of Chicago, Belle and Sebastian, The Temperance Movement, one Television song, and a few tracks from Eurovision 2022. I'm trying to plot out a story via song, makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something beyond bionic sewing.

But the English paper piecing trumps, basting one-inch hexies for a collection of cotton flowers that I'll applique onto some yellow Kona fabric. Keeps my hands and mind occupied because there's only so much caffeine one can healthily ingest. Only so much indescribable confusion one can catalogue (risks take rake omg). The playlist RAWKS; even in the midst of this entry I'm swooping to the beats, feet and arms engaged in the rhythm of melodrama, each song representing a chapter (thereabouts), each five-seven tunes comprising an act that makes some kind of sense. Because right now not much makes any kind of effing reality, purpose, reason. The how behind death can be reduced to physiological footnotes. The why is wholly intangible.

And sometimes the how and why are interchangeable. How could this have happened can be rewritten as Why the *#%@ did such a good person die? Television's "1880 Or So" begins with the lyric, 'Rose of my heart....' Hearing those words from the also recently deceased Tom Verlaine makes me close my eyes, wondering why, how.... For what reason are we here, then taken on sudden frigid winds (risks take rake omg). Not long after we moved to this property, my husband dug up an ax, to which my brother-in-law said, "Save that, we might have a use for it." Over which we chuckled, for that BIL was always thinking ahead, whether it be for necessary (or not) tools to fixing broken things (from small to large) to the right time for breath to stop, a life to end, when the last pink faded from the sunset-lit western horizon.

We couldn't make him stronger or faster. All we could do was hold his hands, whisper how loved he was, how we'd take care of his wife and each other. Then the sliding door was opened and somehow he slipped out as we studied his face, wishing for one more cognizant nod. Risks take rake omg; thanks for letting me ramble.

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