Riding The Wave – Multiple Myeloma

“There is no such thing in anyone’s life as an unimportant day.” – Alexander Woollcott, American Author

Wowsa! What a trip! I was gone for about 11 days traveling back east to visit with our daughter Montana. Dave flew to Baltimore after his business meetings in Rochester and we had a fast and furious weekend with the three of us together. The weather was spectacular and it is the twilight time in DC, in-between the Cherry Blossom festivals and summer onslaught of sightseers. So we decided to enjoy being tourists in a city we lived closed to for 27 years. Dave wanted to go to the National Archives and see The Constitution, Declaration of Independence and The Bill of Rights. He was devastated to see that they were so faded he couldn’t read them. Being a calligrapher for 20 years, of course I knew this. I put my arm around him to reassure him that he could indeed get a very readable facsimile of all these documents in the Archive gift shop! Which he did. I had wrongly assumed it was the Iron Gall Ink used to render these documents that was the problem, though I would have expected it to hold up better. So when I visited Sheila Waters whose husband Peter, known as the father of conservation, consulted on most of our archives for the Library of Congress and Smithsonian, I asked her about it. She said that it was discovered that it was not the ink that was the problem, or even poor preservation, but that the calligrapher improperly prepared the calfskin vellum so the ink couldn’t properly and permanently adhere. But it was still a heart swelling experience.

We whisked Dave off to Dulles Airport to head home and then Monday morning I took off for my trip to our farm in NE PA with a stop on the way to reconnect with Sheila. We decided it had been about 15 years since we had seen one another, with little communication in between. She looked amazing and had her usual humor and energy that I have felt incredibly privileged to know. She is 83 and still going strong. She is now teaching in her home instead of dragging everything to the Casey Barns in Gaithersburg. Her students stay at her home (she can sleep up to 11!). She has locals that will pick them up and drop them off at Baltimore Washington International Airport and a couple who makes dinner for everyone while they are training with her. She has 5 students coming for a class from Australia this summer. I had allotted 2 hours of her time for us to visit and we spent 4 together. It was fabulous. She was disappointed that I wasn’t actively creating with my calligraphy but loved my weaving escapades. She invited me to come back for independent study this fall so she could whip me into shape and get me back on the bicycle. I’m strongly considering it. Especially after seeing her tracings of her newest projects and enjoying all those things I lived and breathed for 20 years. My daughter encouraged me to take over her bedroom for a second studio for my calligraphy. Only after she chided me to stay focused! haha I didn’t take a picture of Sheila and I because she cancelled her hair appointment to see me and I thought how I would not appreciate a photo of me when I need a cut and color! 🙂 Suffice to say, she looks amazing and continues to be someone I hold with great admiration and hope that I can continue to live as full and happy a life as she does.

Then I set off for Hudson Homestead, our farm in NE PA that my grandparents entertained us all our lives. It was three abandoned farms when they bought it for $2,000, amounting to 211 acres. It originally had three barns on it. And the story goes that after my father and Otis cleaned out the old cow barn and were now ready to reinforce the structure, a freak tornado touch down and poof it was destroyed! So the barn near the house was renovated and outfitted with the cow stanchions. The farm has been divvied up over the years and a few 10 acre lots at the edges sold to friends from the city. But essentially it is still a beautiful oasis for me, chocked full of memories and adventures. The slide show (there are a lot of photos so may take awhile to load the full show) is one I put up on my last visit. I didn’t take many photos this time as it was not particularly pretty with mud and so on and I was hanging out with my sister and visiting cousins and my Aunt.

I did run across an old letter my father had written to my mother tucked in between some books. Lynn had given me most of them, but this seemed to be a straggler. It was post marked in 1959 on airmail paper (remember that? What we used to call onion skin. It was light weight so you could mail multiple page letters as cheaply as possible.). At the end of the letter he signed off, “Kiss my baby for me and tell Minnie Bell she can’t keep her.” He was speaking about me and my grandmother that passed away when I was 2 years old. I love finding these little treasures. Many of which I have in my possession but haven’t taken the time to go through and read. After 41 years since his passing, sometimes it’s just still hard. I have to be in the right place. With all that I write on death and dying, loss and survival. Know that it is still a struggle for me from time to time. I work on it. And one of the things I have come to terms with is that I will never stop missing my parents and others I have lost. I may even continue to shed tears for them. But what I try to do is embrace and honor how wonderful they were and how they still have a vested interest in my life and that of my children. Lessons they taught me, stories I can tell, stories they told me. I don’t ever push it away or try to negate it in anyway. I want to have a healthy view of it and I hope that I do.

Anyway, I’m glad to be back home, in my own bed and back to my life. A couple of other nice things going on. Dave continues to do well. Our trip to Arkansas has been pushed back at UAMS’ request to mid May. Our son Hudson has arrived and started with his new office out of Pleasanton, CA and is very happy to be in California. He is still looking for an apartment in Walnut Creek, so in the meantime he is here with us and the drive is long, but it’s temporary. Of course he is sprucing up our yard and one my flower baskets and so on. It’s a joy to have him here. Montana is doing extremely well back East and we are hoping to fly her out for a family trip together. My local yarn shoppe that I love so much called me while I was away and asked if I would be interested in working in the shoppe one day a week in exchange for material (i.e., yarn) and I said “Absolutely!” The fact of the matter is, I hang out there all the time and about 2 years ago I thought, “I would love to work here in exchange for yarn.” Wishes do come true. I’m still working feverishly on my weaving products and honing in them. It’s a joyful thing. I saw Kip’s sister, Maddie while I was back East. She was outside in the yard. She looks like a beautiful elderly lab and her eyesight and hearing are going and her muzzle is white. When I approached her and knelt down she came to me and started to sniff and then the tail began to wag slowly and then fast and she laid her head into me. I teared up as we sat in the driveway and loved each other. When I got up to leave and go to my old neighbor’s she followed me to the edge of the yard at a trot. It was hard. 

 PS. I really missed you guys!

Tags: farm, Hudson Homestead, MishMash