Memorial Day Weekend

 

 Do you have memories of Memorial Day? Today, I think it's treated as just another holiday. Maybe not on the East Coast but here in California it is. As a child though, my Mom would have people save tin cans and they would bring to our house, which she cleaned and they would sit on the back porch until Memorial Day weekend, which she called "decoration day." We lived in a very old farmhouse then. On a property filled with every kind of flower and tree you can imagine. Then she would begin collecting flowers and greenery and she would assemble all of these cans and then we would all go to the cemeteries and she would visit everyone who had gone on ahead. I remember when it dawned on me, there are dead people buried under my feet. Kind of a shock when you are four.

So I woke up thinking about that this morning. This is my grandfathers place of sleep. He maybe had the worst job in the world, in W.W. ll His job was to land on islands in the South Pacific and "clean up." Every island of combatants. He was also at the Battle of Manila. He was changed forever by what he experienced in battle.

 

He never told me stories like he did my brother. I really never knew much about it because he was from that school of women were the weaker vessel and he didn't think it was something a woman should ever hear. I wish he had told me a little bit.

 

I don't know if you can read this but it says at the top of the picture Henry and Maude Ethyl Sexton on their wedding day in 1902. That was my grandpa's parents. So much hope in their young faces. I love that picture of Maude. I never met her even though she was alive when I was a kid. 

 

How did they get from the happy excited place they were in 1909 to here. I always think about that.

These were the five youngest children. The older ones were already married. I think there were 13 children. Part of the farmers, I see in my head as I hook my rug. 

 

He became a farmer too. When we drive to North Carolina we always drive by his land in New Mexico.

See that tree in the background? Its still there. That is the marker I use to see his land from the road. Now it belongs to another family. I think about him every time I pass and remember what it was like to sit on his screened porch and listen to his stories. 

As I hook, and remember, its a story, I didn't know I wanted to tell. I think about it when I am sitting in my sewing chair, remembering and thinking of all of those people who came before that made me. Someday, perhaps, my grand children will tell or write funny stories about what they remember of me. I can just hear my grand children saying, " Do you think Grandma ever heard a Bigfoot? Do you think she ever saw one? " Because I am afraid that is all they will remember because of the stories I told them.  

I hope your weekend is lovely and full of good things. I have set a goal for myself that this rug will be finished by July and hanging above my mantel. That's the goal. So see how my plans go. 

~Kim~

 " Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.  Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."

Philippians 3:12-14 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Progress

 This has been a beautiful May. Just blue skies and warm temps. I normally sit down and by May I know what kind of projects I want to do for the summer. I haven't even planted my tomatoes. I hope to do this for this long weekend. I can't believe we are already to Memorial Day. 

I have been working on my rug. Its funny that I feel like I have worked on it every day for hours and it seems that its not going as fast as I thought it would. Robin asked how big it is. Its 30 by 38. Is that big or have I just turned into the slowest hooker in the world? 

As I am hooking, one of the things I thought to myself, was how on earth would you hook sweat on a working mule? How would you hook, turned earth? How do I hook so it looks like spring planting? 

I have been reading old books, one of them is called, The Land Breakers, by John Ehle. Then I am also reading The Trees by Conrad Richter. But, they don't use the mules or horse to pull the plow. They do it themselves. Maybe when I get further into them they will go into it more. I am so fascinated by The Land Breakers, we have lost so many skills. I was so intrigued by the gathering of herbs in the wild, by the spinning and the looms and the dyeing of the wool. I keep reading so I can find what it looked like, felt liked and smelled like by a man working hours breaking the land, in order to take care of his family.  

Our son and his wife were leaving, and he just stopped and took this picture of Yosemite. I just thought it was breath taking beautiful. I thought you might enjoy seeing it. 

My plan is to work on my rug today. I hope your day is filled to the brim with pleasant things.

~Kim~

---From The Land Breakers---"The wash of color flowed down toward the clearing, reached it in the sharpness of an early morning. And about them now the woods were changed into a fairyland of color.

The Buckeye turned yellow and dropped its eye-shaped seeds. The box elder near the spring spring turned into a bank of yellow leaves and pods; the maple in the valley just to the edge of the clearing got red as fire and beside it a white oak turned into the color of old wine; the sourwood was a rich red, the red oak was orange, and the possums climbed higher every night into the persimmon trees."( John Ehle)
 

Back from Roaming

 

We are finally back from Arizona. I had mentioned we would be going there after our daughter had her baby. She had another girl. The girls are ahead now. Eight girls, seven boys. She weighed 7 pounds 10 ounces and she was 20 inches long. Her name is Rebecca Rowan. Mom is doing fine. 

 

We spent a lovely time with her and the whole family. Her children are from 18 to new born. So I was pretty busy and loved every minute. The hardest part about any visit is going home. I took all of my hooking and all of my sewing projects. Did I do any of it? No, I don't know why I bother. I always have this idea that I am going to sit in the campsite and hook and do all of that. Do I ever? No, we always hike or do things and sitting is something that we don't do very much. 

 

I really did take pictures of our newest grand daughter. I thought. Ron must have taken the pictures and as I write this blog, I do not have them on my phone or on my computer. She is such darling little thing.

I never had babies that small. She has all of this lovely dark hair. I held her and rocked her. Kessie would hand me the baby and say, " Don't let her go to sleep." It was such a sweet place to be, with all the different ages of kids and to be rocking a baby. Just a sweet time of life. Now the drive home was different. The wind through the desert was so crazy. We stopped for gas in Barstow. Then had to stop again in Tehachapi.to get gas before we could get home. We were getting less that 4 miles to the gallon because of the wind. It was so nice to get home though. Polly went crazy running and running in the back yard.
 

Before we left I slipped in two days of dyeing wool for my rug. The is for land, and sky and the mule.

The sky I want to look like the skies when we are driving from New Mexico into Texas. The sky is so big and endless. But I also want the clouds to look like the thunderheads that build over Oklahoma in the afternoon. This winter one of my friends traced my family history for me. It was such an amazing gift. I found out that as far as you got back in my family history, my family were farmers. Farmers who farmed with teams of horses and mules. It so captured my thinking that I wanted to see what I could do with the picture in my mind. One of the interesting things was they were some of the first settlers into North Carolina and Tennessee. Which I found extremely interesting because they lived first close to the place our oldest son, Ben and his family live now. Its like those mountains called Ben to come back home. But you can follow their track as each generation kept moving west. 

 

 I am working on the mule and thinking about the generations that worked and poured out their sweat and tears and sometimes their lives to raise each generation. While I try and tell a story that lives only in my mind and try to transfer it to wool. This is the biggest rug I have ever done. Its going to be what I work on this summer. 

I hope its been a nice May for you all. Its just been a beautiful spring here. I still haven't got my garden in yet. I did manage to get it ready to plant some things. I hope you have a wonderful time doing what ever you love to do and thank you so much for stopping by, my once and a while blog.

~Kim~

 

 Then followed that beautiful season…Summer…Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow