Time for some heavily spiked tea…

I skipped out Thursday morning for a couple hours, to visit a fibery friend, a well respected fiber artist that is one of the most productive and prolific people I know.  I’m jealous of the time she is able to devote to her work.  We sat over a cup of tea on her deck, enjoying the outdoors, taking time to breathe.

I knew the first six months of this year were going to be challenging.  And they are.  The funny thing is, everything that’s happening is wonderful, the amount of work I have, my daughter’s graduation and subsequent move back home.  My son returning home from a 10 month middle east deployment.  My 60th birthday.  Spring planting season.  The happy birds and blooming flowers and warm days for eating outside.  Summer salads and bare feet.  None of this is really problematic, except there is only one of me, and even though I’m a true blue Gemini, which means there are at least two of me on a good day, it isn’t enough to accomplish all I want to accomplish, and be and do all I need to be and do.

And so, I sat on my butt with my friend Diane, and she listened to me with profound patience, and nodded knowingly through it all, and she didn’t try to fix anything, since there is nothing to fix.  My beloved housekeeper has lyme disease and is really struggling.  So gee, I guess I have to clean my own house.  How tough is that?  I have constant interruptions, because, gee, my lovely wonderful and talented daughter is in the next room and doing a bang up job of reconfiguring her life.  We have only had one serious meltdown so far.  That’s a record.

I’m trying to finish writing my last webinar for Weaving Today.  Part 4 airs on Monday. Part 5 isn’t until June, but I have to submit it in the next week, surely before I leave for Peters Valley on the 29th to teach my yardage class.  So the extent of my creativity today was to make a ball button and photograph it step by step.  I do really really love what I do, this is my job and I’m good at it, but there is no balance right now.  And truth be told, I wouldn’t change a thing.  My son returns on Monday, and I have his room sort of vacuumed and sort of dusted, and the sheets clean, and the rest will be up to him.

I’m spending a couple hours a day weeding and cleaning up the yard and the decks.  I’ve filled so many cans for the compost pile at the dump, that we take a trailer load every couple days.  I’m literally forced to stop and smell the flowers and decide which ones stay and which ones go.  Curse you Ajuga, even if you are pretty right now.  You have infiltrated every bed we have, every plant we have, and you are choking out everything else.

The winter was hard on our house.  The ancient air conditioning system needs replacing, and we have a contract with a local company, but they can’t come until June.  Nothing to be done but patiently wait.  We need stone work.  Have to call for estimates.  We need a new roof.  We need a lot of things.  But I have what’s important.  I have my family close, or almost close, just a few more days and my son returns.  I have my health, and my work, and life is really really good, and the time to set all this aside so I can create again will return, but for now, everything has its season and I need to enjoy the moments life is giving me now, they won’t come round again quite like this.

Friday is my 60th birthday.  I’ll be teaching second graders about fiber all day in a local school district.  We are planning an open house, impromptu, the best kind, for Saturday May 23rd.  If you read this and are within shouting distance of northern NJ, please come by and help us celebrate all that is good.  Any time after 1pm, until…