The big day ...

Tomorrow.

That's a nice word.

Why?

Paul and I officially open our store tomorrow. How cool is that??? As an added bonus, we've already had three sales in the past two days and we weren't even open for business. Rah! I'll tell y'all the truth, there were days I had my doubts we'd ever see the open sign on our door. It's been a long three months. I'm just tickled pink, I am. I'd be even happier about it if I wasn't sick. Ain't that a kicker? Opening a natural healing center and a co-owner is sick with a cold. Dandy. Fortunately, I'm on the mend. And, I've got drugs. Sometimes they are a necessity. I think this is one of those times. Should the drugs fail, my neighbor gave me a bottle of Mr. Boston's Rock & Rye. That stuff, of course, would either cure me or kill me.

Wow. I can't believe it's been so long since I last blogged. That whole 'blog every day' kinda' got shot in the buttocks, didn't it? Sorry 'bout that. Life hasn't been cooperating on some levels of late. Blog time being one of those levels. I suppose I should catch y'all up on the news.

Where to begin?

Ah! The Dream Sweater. Yes, my dear ones, it is complete. I actually finished it on Friday, March 11. Just in time for a special event my best buddy, Kasey, was having that evening. Weather permitted that I was able to wear it a couple more times before it got too warm. I know, I know. I should have taken a photo of me wearing it, but this will have to do ....

Lovely.

Sadly, the colors don't show well in the photo, nor the slight sheen from the silk content of the yarn. But, suffice it to say, the sweater looks like the inside of an abalone shell - with fuzz - from the kid mohair content. You can kind of see the colors on the sleeves. I really like my sweater. I guess I damn well aught to considering the cost of that Prism Indulgence yarn. The only sad part of this endeavor is that it's now really too warm to wear it. Oh well. I'll keep it near, fondle it with affection, and wait for cold weather so I can wear it EVERY FREAKIN' DAY.

The state of the economy hit home, literally speaking. The day my Mamaw died my husband lost his job. The company he drives for is closing three of their terminals ... one of which he operates out of. Rather excellent timing, wouldn't you agree? I had just gotten over to my uncle's house with Mamaw's personal belongings from the nursing home when the husband called with the news. I think I was past the point of even being surprised. The up side is that he was given 60 days to find a new job before the gates close. Great. So we're waiting to hear back from another company he applied to. Cross your fingers.

The hummingbirds are back! Okay, I've only seen two or three so far but I put out all the feeders. I just love my hummers. They make me happy. I could sit (and have) for hours watching their antics and territorial disputes over those feeders. What they lack in size is more than made up for in aggressive defense of a claimed feeder. Last year, one cocky little buzzard tried to horde two feeders. Worked his ass off trying to defend them. He was finally forced to concede one to a zippy, hot-shot female who decided he needed to be put in his place. A few fly-by head thumps and her chosen feeder was won. Feisty little bitch.

I'm sad to say my studio has seen very little of me these past several weeks. I did sort of finish one abstract I've been working on but I'm not pleased with the result. Looks more like a Monet-ish landscape. It's the second attempt at this particular abstract and I'm not sure why I can't get it to work out. I'm still 'stewing' on this version, trying to figure a way to tweak it somehow. It just doesn't feel as good to me as the other abstracts I've done. It's a conundrum.

I also gessoed over the Kwan Yin I'd been working on for months. Like the abstract, the painting simply wasn't working out as I wanted. I'd paint a little here, paint a little there, try this, try that. All for naught. I know exactly how I want the end product to look and what was on that canvas just wasn't cuttin' the mustard. I'd had a similar problem when I was working on Preordained and I spent a ridiculous amount of time stressing over getting it right. While the end result of that particular painting turned out well enough, I wasn't prepared to go through the same stress with this Kwan Yin. Hence the gesso. When all else fails, drop back and punt, so to speak. I'll redraw it off on my nicely primed canvas and give it another go. I think I may use it as the first work-in-progress on my website's Wet Brush page. Hey, the first photo will be easy ... a blank canvas!

My mother had a birthday on the 16th. She's 71. She's also a Jehovah's Witness and they don't do birthdays. Needless to say, I called her up and said, "Happy day. Of course, I'd wish you a Happy Birthday but I know that would just get your knickers in a twist." I'll give her credit. She laughed. Why is it you don't really think about your parents getting old? I simply do not think of Mother as being 71. It's like she's stuck at 59ish, or there'bouts, in my head. Granted, her hair is as snow white as I'm dreaming mine will some day be. But snow white hair does not mean a person is old. And it's true, she's not as physically active/capable as she used to be, etc., etc., etc. I think I just see so much of the same hypochondria steadily coming out in her as it was with my grandmother for years and years. The really bad thing about it with Mother is she has internet access. That's like giving an addict a key to the pharmacy.

So, when she starts her "aches & complaints" I tune it out. For all I know, it may come a day when there is a legitimate complaint and I'm not going to believe her. That's the thing about hypochondria, you hear so much pissing and moaning about all these self-created illnesses that a real illness isn't accepted as real. Think The Boy Who Cried Wolf. If I recall the story correctly, the wolf ate all his sheep in the end. Oh, I won't go into all the psychology and blah, blah, blah about why Mother is like she is. Let's just say she's spent her whole life looking for a way to be noticed. She's done that in a variety of ways over the years and illness is her method of choice now. Well, has been for several years. Truth is, I feel sorry for her. She's a very unhappy person. Nothing can be done about it. It's her choice.

Well, I certainly can't end this post on such a sour note but I don't have much else to tell ya' right now. Hmmm. What uplifting thing can I tell y'all about? Oh yeah ...

We open our store tomorrow!!!

Namaste, y'all ...

Down to the wire.

The new Reiki space is ready, almost. We're just waiting on the different vendors to bring in their products for the store area. Oh, the waiting! Anticipation. It's rough. Two of our main vendors have been sick and have gotten behind with their work. That, of course, put us behind in getting the doors open. We had hoped to be able to open at the first of April. Now it will be next week or there'bouts'. Yeah, a bit of a frustration but it's okay. I know that those doors shouldn't be open until "it's ready". You never get a second chance to make a first impression. We're a different enough type of business in this community that we need to make a really good first impression to be successful. And I believe we will. It's going to be great.

I'm excited about it. I can't help myself. I really can't. What surprises me about that is how I've always been a solitary kind of person. Introvert. Hermit. Didn't like being around people too much. Especially people I didn't know. Lordly! but that made me so uncomfortable and jittery. While I still get a bit anxious around a group of new people, the general uncomfortable part is pretty much gone. What changed? Well, me, of course. I've learned a lot. I've come to understand why it made me so uptight. All my psychic antennae got overloaded and I didn't know how to "get my bubble on." Way too much sensory input and no filtering system to regulate it. Not fun, I can tell you.

I also never thought of myself as a very compassionate person. It's funny now to understand that being an empath actually means I'm compassionate to the point of feeling what another person (or animal) is feeling. Mentally, emotionally and sometimes physically. I always thought it was just me. I didn't understand I was picking up and experiencing what everyone else was feeling half of the time. I could feel incredibly sad, happy, or sometimes angry ... for no apparent reason. I stayed as tense as a piano string all the time. It was like an emotional roller coaster and I didn't know I'd paid for the ticket to ride. Unfortunately, I still sometimes pick stuff up when I'm not paying attention or I'm feeling a bit run down. When that happens, I have to find a place to get quiet and let it go.

But the upside to being this weirdo empathic-intuitive-psychic-medium person is that I can now use those skills to help people. That is another thing I've never felt comfortable with. Helping felt like giving too much of myself away - and I didn't have enough of me at the time to spare any for anyone else. Helping felt more like being taken advantage of. Just the same, it always seemed as if I was Dear Abby without the newspaper column. (or the money!) People came to me with their problems. They talked and I listened. More often than not I gave them some kind of useful advice, or at the very least, a different perspective to look at their problems from.

It took years to figure out why, given my introverted nature, that people seemed attracted to me without my encouraging it. As a matter of fact, I had been told more than once I intimidated people, I seemed very self-confident and highly independent, or that I even sometimes seemed remote and cold-hearted. No surprise there. I did have an ability to remain detached, to simply walk away from most people without a second thought. I didn't allow myself to get attached to many people. I had really big, thick walls around my heart. What I came to realize was it was the Divine's way of repeatedly knocking at my door. It kept pushing at me the very thing I kept trying to push away. Connecting to people.

I've always been psychic and intensely empathic. As a child I didn't understand what it was or why I felt so different from everyone around me. My family treated it as excessive imagination or as a kind of joke. There was no encouragement. No help. No anything to guide me or nurture the skills. I felt like an oddity. Many times I wondered if I was just crazy. That's tough for a kid, thinking your nuts and no one would tell you you weren't. Then the teenage years came and I was just too busy trying to survive. Instead of being better able to navigate my life through the use of these skills, I floundered. I shut off that part of myself and spent the next years just trying to get from day to day without ending up dead or in a psycho ward somewhere. My inclination for isolation really kicked into high gear in those years. And a constant state of depression hung on me like a wet wool blanket. The thought that I would some day be an "instrument of healing" never crossed my mind. Had someone told me I would have said they were the one who was nuts.

But, y'all, life has a funny way of taking you in directions and places you never dreamed you'd go. The Divine Plan charts your course and you're boat's going in that direction one way or another ... I don't care how many anchors you through over the side. Even after I started re-opening to my skills again, growing on my own personal healing journey, I still never thought I would be in the place I am now. I never thought I would be a Reiki practitioner. I never thought I would openly say to people I'm psychic, that I'm a medium, that I'd read tarot cards. I never thought I'd own a store - much less a store for healing and psychic stuff.

Yet here I am, on the cusp of opening the doors to a "wellness center" on the Main St. of my town. Surprising. Amazing. It's pretty darn cool, too. Not only will I be doing Reiki sessions for clients, but I also have a special reading area for doing intuitive tarot and psychic readings as well. I'm feeling so positive about the place and what it will grow into and become. I'm feeling confident about myself and my skills in a way I never have before. I look forward to the new people I will meet and look forward to helping them begin their own journey towards healing. I feel like I'm a part of something bigger then just this store space. And, I like it. I'm glad of it. I'm thankful for it.

Namaste y'all ...

In the blink of an eye.

My grandmother went into the hospital on Saturday, March 29th and we buried her on Saturday, April 4th. She was 92 years old. I'm still in a somewhat surprised and confused state-of-mind. Honestly, I didn't think I would be this upset. I haven't been as close with her over the past few years as I was when I was younger. I've been busy and I didn't go visit with her much over the past year or so.

I know she's gone, yet, I feel as if I could still jump in my Jeep, swing by the store for a bag of her favorite bite-sized Mounds candy bars, drive over to Autumn Care, the nursing home she's been in for several years, and we could sit in her room and have a chat. On the other hand, I don't know if I could even look at the wrapper of those candy bars without bursting into tears. She'd always light up like a Christmas tree when I'd bring her a bag of them. They, and a host of other things, will forever remind me of my "Mamaw".

She always had wintergreen Certs in her pocketbook. She never once said a thing about me or my cousins sneaking them every chance we got. I'll never forget the day I discovered the stash of them she kept in her dresser drawer. It was then I realized she wasn't just buying those Certs for herself, she got them for us, too.

She always kept a bottle of Nivea lotion on her dresser. When I was a little kid I thought that stuff was for old ladies. At first I didn't care too much for the smell of it. Then it became the scent I most associated with Mamaw. I remember how she'd rub it on her hands and arms then give me a hug. My whole head would be enveloped in the scent of that lotion. Over the years I've discovered that Nivea is not only a damn good lotion, it's one of the few that is okay for a vegetarian, eco-conscious person like myself to use. I'm sure my Mamaw didn't think about that. She just liked the stuff.

She made the absolute best gingerbread in the world. Not gingerbread that's used for cookies and table-top houses at Christmas. I'm talking about the real, old fashioned kind that's made in loaves like bread. It's dark, moist and has a sharp bite of ginger with a hint of clove. The smell, when it's baking, is enough to make you drool all over yourself. I used to hover all around her kitchen, waiting impatiently for her to pull it out of the oven and set it on the table. She always made me wait about 10 minutes for it to cool before she would take it out of the pan. Though it was really still too hot to hold, I'd snatch a piece and stuff it in my mouth. I didn't care if I scalded my tongue and burned my fingers. Fresh from the oven was the best way to eat that stuff. I'm really gonna' miss Mamaw's "famous" gingerbread.

I got my love of quilting from her. I even have some of the last quilt squares she started packed away in my studio closet. Mamaw made quilts the old fashioned way ... handmade. My Mamaw and Papaw were poor, so she would collect old shirts, dresses, aprons, or whatever cloth she could get her hands on. Each piece of fabric was cut out individually from a pattern made out of paper or cardboard. All the pieces were sewn together by hand. Then, the entire thing was hand quilted either on her lap or on a quilt frame. She never used a modern rotary cutter or a sewing machine to make her quilts. No, Sir. They were entirely handmade. That, y'all, was a true labor of love.

I remember one she made for me when I was about eight years old. It was a traditional scrap quilt in a basic block pattern. It wasn't fancy but it was made from hundreds of different scraps of material. No two pieces were the same. I used to sit on my bed and look at all the different fabrics and how she'd cut them out in what is called a "fancy cut". If the fabric had a particular design, say butterflies and flowers, she would make sure she cut the fabric so the butterfly would be in the center of the square or triangle.

But the best quilt of hers I've ever had was one she made out of big scraps of stuff. Being rather thrifty, she used an old worn out quilt as the batting layer between the newer quilt layers. Because it was so thick, the new quilt was a "tied quilt", meaning instead of stitching all the layers together she used bits of yarn in strategically placed spots to tie the layers together so they wouldn't shift. What resulted wasn't a very pretty quilt but it was without doubt the heaviest and warmest quilt I've ever had. I loved that quilt like a security blanket. I used it for years and years. It quite literally fell apart from age and use. It was ugly but I'll admit I still miss the damn thing.

Mamaw had the greenest thumb of anyone I've ever known. I swear she could grow flowers from a bare stick. Although Mamaw didn't have a good eye for landscaping she loved flowers and growing things in her yard. Every place she ever lived felt the touch of that green thumb. She spent hours digging, planting and tending her yard. I can't tell you how many times I've pulled up in the driveway to see my grandmother's backside in the air as she bent over to pinch off a faded bloom or poke some new seedling in the dirt.

She loved birds and was a sharpshooter with a sling-shot against marauding cats who dared stalk her bird feeders. I think the only time I ever heard her say a "cuss word" was in respect to some cat getting in her yard and killing one of her birds.

I won't say she was a perfect grandmother. Mamaw had her quirks and idiosyncrasies. At times you'd want to duck tape her mouth shut. She never stopped talking. She was a hypochondriac as well. I've seen her so mad at one doctor who didn't agree with her diagnosis she could have chewed nails. She'd gone in, barely shuffling her feet and leaning heavily on her cane. When he said she was healthy as a 40 year old woman (she was 60 at the time) Mamaw literally jumped off the exam table and stormed out of his office, cane left propped against the wall. Her kitchen cabinet looked like a pharmacy.

But I know she loved me. She would have done anything for me. Would have given me her last dime if I'd needed it. The Saturday she was taken to the hospital she told any and all who would listen about her granddaughter, the artist. She was my biggest fan. And because of that, Mamaw was the only one I still let call me by my nick-name, the nick-name my father gave me the day I was born. I was premature and weighed 5 lbs. like a bag of sugar. Thus, he dubbed me "Suggie", pronounced with an "sh" like sugar. It took me sixteen years to convert the family to calling me by my given name, Carol, and shed that damn nick-name. The only hold-out was Mamaw. She tried, but 98% of the time she'd forget and call me Suggie.

When she was taken from the hospital back to the nursing home on Tuesday she was sedated with Valium and pretty much unresponsive. Later that afternoon she roused up a little and opened her eyes. She was still kinda' loopy and asked me who I was. I leaned over and said, "Hey Mamaw, it's Carol." She looked confused. So I said, "It's me, it's Suggie." It was the last time she fully opened her eyes and looked at me with recognition. Even though she never opened her eyes again for me, she knew I was there. I'm really glad of that.

I do have regrets and I know it's only natural to do so. I can sit here and say I should have done this or I should have done that, but I know it's a moot point. I can't change or redo any part of my past in regards to my Mamaw. But I can remember her. I can celebrate those memories in my heart. I can say she knew I loved her and I knew she loved me. Here at the end, that's all that matters.

Namaste, y'all ...