Quilt Workshop

Gwen Marston with one of her quilts

Just returned from a quilt workshop with master quilter Gwen Marston. She holds workshops every year for five one-week sessions at an old lodge/restort in Elk Rapids, Michigan called White Birch Lodge. Usually I go in week five, but needed to move to week three this year because of my son's wedding coming up in two weeks.

This year the theme was "liberated quilting" which is a technique of hers. We were free to just sew, shop, and go out to eat for five whole days - it was heaven! I worked on two projects, plus my daughter's college quilt. Very productive time for me and it felt good to be able to sew, which is something I've really put on the back burner this year while I dealt with other family and work issues.

The weather was beautiful the first two days, rained like crazy the third day, the wind blew in a truly spooky way on the fourth day, and it drizzled again on the fifth day. But the sixth day it was cool and sunny for the drive home and the trees along the sides of the roads were starting to turn into their fall colors.

Back to School

Each year whenever my children would head off to school, I would line them up on the front porch and take their picture. Since I've had children attending school since 1985, I've got quite a collection. This year I forgot to do that with my daughter on the day we took her back to college.

We also missed the opportunity to go with her to buy her school supplies; at 20 years old she pretty much takes care of that herself. But for many years she would go with her father to work on a day in late summer on something they would call "special days" and buy a backpack and supplies and anything else she needed following the list from school.

I loved going to school, and I loved sending my own children off to school. Something about this time of year just fires up the blood and makes me anxious to get back to work and learn something or create something.

Now, with all my children out on their own, I am contemplating a return to school myself and am studying for the graduate exam. It's been a while since I've stuck my nose in a book for anything except pleasure and now I'm studying and trying to get information I don't really want to know to stick. It's a challenge.

Dark Omens

There was a loud and raucous cawing filling the air as I stepped out my front door. I walked the length of the porch to investigate, but I knew what I would find. In the two tall, dead trees bordering our yard, a flock of crows had taken up squatters’ rights in the tallest of the skeletal limbs and were squawking at each other. Groups of crows are sometimes known as a murder. Was this a warning?

It’s hard not to conjure up scenes from a Hitchcock movie when I see this many of that kind of bird together. The kind that attacked, the kind that pecked eyes with their long, black, lethal beaks.

On the drive into town I stopped at a red light and there, perched on the sign next to the road, was a single crow staring at me, sizing me up. Was this a dark omen?

Like the raven who came tap, tap, tapping on Poe’s window and entered to watch a mad man rant, could these dark wraiths harbor anything but doom?

Ravens or crows, I’m sure any competent ornithologist would gladly tell me how they differ, but I like to think of them as simply blackbirds. Then it brings to mind the gentle lyrics of a Beatle song:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night,
Take these broken wings and learn to fly,
All your life,
You were only waiting for this moment to arrive.

Don’t we all, in the deep, dark part of our soul, shelter a little broken wing? And don’t we all have some kind of “moment” we are awaiting to arrive and thrill to the notion that it actually might happen?

These dark omens dressed in mourning feathers and perched high over my head in dead branches, could be just a bunch of crows with nothing better to do – or they could be harbingers for the start of new possibilities.

My choice!

Denise Kalin Tackett
Sept. 14, 2010

Fragile Wings

There are monarch butterflies in my backyard. We usually see a few this time of year as they travel down the shore of Lake Michigan, but this early autumn they have alighted in our pine trees and transformed our yard into a butterfly garden.

I believe that God sends us reminders when we have faced so many difficult times that it's hard to believe we will ever feel happy again.

This year the hydranga bushes that line the back of my mother's house exploded with blooms. The thing is - they had never bloomed before! I know because we discussed it every year, how big and beautiful the bushes were, but no blooms, and this went on for eight or nine years. This year, after she died in early spring, they bloomed; big pink, flat blossoms that lasted throughout the summer.

And now I have monarch butterflies in my yard. Orange and black creatures that seem too fragile to travel any distance at all. I don't know how long they will stay, and what the journey ahead holds for them, but I'm grateful they came to give me this gentle reminder that life goes on, that beautiful days can and will happen.

A message carried on fragile wings to a grateful heart.

Summer Beach 2010

I'm starting up my writing group, NightWriters, for the season tonight. The assignment was to write about "my summer vacation." Here's my essay:

On a quiet Friday morning at the end of August I impulsively pulled on a swimsuit and jumped into the car. We live about 500 yards from Lake Michigan, but to get to a swimming beach requires a drive of about three miles. At this time of day, mine was the only car in the small gravel parking lot.

I stood on the boardwalk and looked over the narrow deserted beach and the calm, cool water beyond. Half of the small beach was inhabited by sea gulls nestled into the sand looking like they were not yet ready to rise for the day. The other half was empty of life and a long, dead, driftwood tree was lying parallel to the shore. That’s where I spread my blanket and, with my back against the tree, I ate my picnic breakfast and wrote in my journal.

A tiny voice in my head immediately sounded a warning about swimming alone, but I decided “to hell with it” and took the plunge. I eased my way past the stones near the shore and soon enough reached the sandy bottom where I had enough even footing to dip my whole body down into the water. Despite many, many hot days this summer, the lake was still cold enough to give me that gasping shock I usually felt when first going into big lake water.

This was my lake, the one I grew up with, the one I felt safe in although, truth be told, it could be dangerous. It had already claimed several lives by this point in the summer. As a nod to my more cautious side, I decided not to swim out over my head, but I went out deep enough to stretch my arms and legs. I’ve been a swimmer all my life and this was what I loved the most – that feeling of weightlessness when floating in water. Perhaps even more appreciated this year when I feel as if the weight of my life is sitting heavily on my shoulders, threatening to drown me.

It was the end of the last month of summer and this was the very first day I was enjoying it. I had gone off to a weekend at a cottage with my family in July and off to Santa Fe for a vacation earlier in August, and there were plenty of times I sat around and did nothing, but I was always agonizing over everything I should be doing. This was the first time all summer, maybe all year, when I gave myself permission to not feel the pressure to go – do – finish something!

I have noticed throughout my life that sometimes a given year will carry a theme; 2010 is such a year and the theme seems to be one of endings and beginnings.

Already this year my best friend lost her father two weeks before I lost my mother and a few days ago one of my daughter’s best friends lost her mother to suicide. These were heart-wrenching endings. On the flip side, before the year is out, I will have attended three weddings, including my son’s; and five people close to me will give birth, one of which has already produced my first grandchild.

And, here I sit in the middle – too old for beginnings and, God willing, too young for endings. The wide-eyed observer destined to float along and let the joy and sadness wash over my heart like waves, trying not to get caught up in the undertow.

I hobbled back over the stones and went up on the sand to lie down on my blanket. The beach was still deserted, but the sun was warming the air and felt good on my face and arms; too long spent indoors.

In a few days we will move our daughter back to college, but this year she goes into a house. When she lived in a dorm it was a little easier to think of her as still living at home, but when you move furniture, dishes, whole wardrobes - there’s no denying she has a new home base.

It’s a different kind of ending and beginning; certainly not as final as death, not as life-changing as marriage or birth; difficult for me, but so exciting for her.

So perhaps this fall I can finally relax and ride out the rest of this year…. float on my back while the swells push me along, let my bruises heal, and gather strength to face the endings by embracing the joy of the beginnings.