seemingly random dreams & promises
in journal
i just woke up from a beautiful dream. so sweet and longed for, but still a surprise, with a mix of real and not real, like any good dream should have.
in a few hours, i’m going with my mom to baltimore for her citizenship test and interview.
i’m finally putting together my notes from my fiber class, and i thought maybe i’ll do two little videos of how i used the drum carder and the combs. sound fun?
after years and years of daydreaming and falling asleep paging through seed catalogs and gardening books, i’m finally making my own garden. i bought plants at maryland sheep & wool – dye plants too! – and got a bunch more yesterday from a little old general store down the street. i tried to grow some veggies from seedlings but i sadly killed them all. ! there’s two leeks or so that survived, that’s all. anyhow, pics to come.
finished two languishing knits, and i’m happy with them, but i gotta take proper pics there too. my mom and my oldest sister are in the middle of knitting projects too, so some nights we sit around the kitchen table (ok, island) and watch tv and chat while we clickity-clack away. very nice.
my dad is holding steady. the doctors gave him a couple of weeks over a month ago. he’s so thin, it’s a hurtful surprise to see it, remember it, every morning when i go to give him a kiss hello. he squeezes my hand, most of the time, to communicate, but yesterday i got a handful of words, and it was a combination of happiness and sadness – happy to hear him, of course, but so sad to realize all the more how he’s still here, just trapped in a brain and body that is falling apart around him. it’s just so insane.
i think the older i get, the more i realize how precious love is. and i don’t mean this just about my dad, though of course he’s a big part, but also about people you meet, along the way, that you love. i mean, it sounds so hokey, but i kinda shudder to think how carelessly i treated love when i was younger. like i thought it just grew on trees, no biggie, when in reality, you have to handle love, and those you love, with so much care and attention. they’re precious! they’re one in a million! if not more like one in a billion. now, with losses of love around me, imminent or done, only now do i get it.
maybe this is the part about growing up that makes one slow down. i remember always being disappointed in anne (of green gables, of course 
) when she grew up – she got so less spunky and fun, and instead was all wise and matronly. i’ve always been a fast talker, walker, do-er, and i like that about me. but maybe anne slowed down because partially because she learned about loss and how easily it happens, about how fragile we all are in our lives, and so by slowing down, you’re more careful, of yourselves, of those around you.. hm. i don’t know if i want to learn this then. i like moving around with the friskiness of a kid, babbling away at a million hours a minutes, laughing and crying within the space of ten minutes. it’s a crazy hectic way to live, but that’s how i’ve always been.
but again, it probably doesn’t have to be one extreme or the other, right? silly andrea. !
off to putter around my plants, take some pics, and get dressed for baltimore ~ ~ hope each one of you have a good thursday ~
p.s. two songs in my head this morning: violent femme’s good feeling and these days by nico.
