Plans change

Sometimes plans change.  Sometimes changed plans can work in your favor. My plans with Friend Laurie for today changed but it's still a gorgeous sun shiny day so I took advantage of preparing some stars.  Friend Jan gave Friend Marilyn and I some antique scrappy stars  she knew her church quilt group wouldn't get to.  Many years ago Marilyn and I worked a quilt together so we thought it would be fun to do this one together.  By together I mean we both work on our own but they will be basically the same quilt for both of us.

 I took advantage of the sun and gently soak washed the stars and put them in the sun upside down to dry.  It's such a pretty day today it didn't take long. 

These are very old scrappy stars and no two are alike and are all hand pieced on a foundation fabric. Marilyn is going to prep hers with the starched turned under edge technique.  I'm going to needle turn mine.   We found some fabrics in her stash with dark backgrounds so the stars stand out. Marilyn's is a blue/gray print and mine is a green print. They didn't do well with a light background.
    I'm going to baste them all down and use it as my take-along project this summer.

 A Lowell friend - the one who gave me the feedsacks also included this quilt top in the mix.  It was very chewed up around the edges, like a dog or mouse or something got at it.  Last night I got the seam ripper out and took off the bad edges then this morning gently soak washed it (by hand) and let the nice day dry it. Without the borders it's a nice child/crib size.  I'm on my way to seeing if the good part of the borders might fit back on it now that it's smaller.

Ironed, folded, stacked, now I do what I'm horrible at.  Cutting the background for the stars. They say measure twice, cut once.  Well, I can measure ten times and still cut it wrong and will then call Marilyn in a panicked screaming fit to fix it. It happens.

Flower Day

I look forward to this day every year.  The weather people have stopped forecasting snow, the days are warm enough and I choose a bright-sunny-blue-sky day to go to the greenhouse and buy my geraniums.  I go to a place quite a way from here but their prices are unbeatable and so with blue skies and sunshine and windows rolled down and radio on I have my ME day. The car is filled to overflowing.

 The caladium are for the planter on the front porch because it's in the shade and they love it and so do I.

But there is nothing happier in a pot than a calypso red geranium.  Nothing. So I surround the porches and fill the planters with them. 

Endurance

Busy spring brings busy kids and everyone is happy to be out moving around again but try as she will our daughter just can't be in four places at the same time.  As Elizabeth said, "mom needs a transmorgifier." 

 Elizabeth and her friend were paired for their first tennis match yesterday

 She wasn't upset with the loss of the match because she said they did better than they expected.

There were several kids on the tennis team that had to be at school for their orchestra concert early that evening. There was a two hour window after school to play the tennis match, change clothes, eat, and arrive at school for the concert  so the coach had those kids play first. What a trooper!

 Spring concert was amazing.  These kids have never touched their instruments until last September and now they're doing this!

After running 22 laps around the track after school for Girls on the Run Adelaide fell asleep 15 minutes before the concert started.  She did wake up and cheered her sister's performance.

The Ash Family

The Ash Family by Molly Dektar

      I am the type of person who thinks for themselves. Sometimes I’m wrong and sometimes I’m not but it’s my wrong and my right. Never, ever have I understood how someone can be brainwashed, convinced so completely to give up. And so, people who become members of cults have left me in a quandry. The Ash family is a cult.

      Berie is a young woman at a crossroads, trying to figure out how to live her own life and not the one prescribed by her mother and on again/off again boyfriend. Apparently this makes her an easy target when she is spotted by Bay, the cult’s recruiter, at a bus stop. I don’t know how the recruiters know an easy prey but they do. They wouldn’t find one in me so I don’t understand why anyone would watch their suitcase leave in the hold of the bus and go off with this stranger. But that’s what Berie does.

     Bay takes her deep into the hills of North Carolina’s mountains and introduces her to the community, the Ash family, led by a man named Dice. Berie is given a new name, Harmony, and told she will stay three days or forever, that there is nothing she will have to do if she doesn’t want to, there is complete freedom here in the family, freedom to be free of the outside where everything is fake.

     Harmony stays longer than three days. She finds wearing other people’s clothes strange, sleeping in an unassigned bed different, the smells of each other off putting until she smells the same. The food is foraged, grown, butchered, milked, cheesed. And she is happy living with nature and following its dictates, she truly does.

     But there are rules and Dice and Bay and the group do tell you to do things you don’t want to do and treat you differently until you do them. And if you are like Berie you want so to be accepted by these people you will do anything. You believe this is a family even when some tell you it isn’t.

And when the people she has come to care about the most start disappearing with no clear explanation, she begins to question that she is still searching even after she thought she found her answers.

     I watched Berie become a member, listened to her reason and try to figure out her life and she really believed what she was seeing and doing yet she also never felt her place secure within the family, that they never really trusted her. She strove even harder to prove herself to them, especially Dice and Bay, who continually played with her mind.

     I found The Ash Family fascinating. I found Berie’s story fascinating, but personally, I still don’t understand that kind of giving up my brain to someone else.