The Sioux Falls Falls!

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Last fall my family and I took a little jaunt over to Falls Park in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The Sioux Falls – on the Big Sioux River – are a many-layered falls, with something to be found for everyone on the vast grounds. Picnics, history, sand castles, water…outdoors…it’s fabulous.

It had been several years since we’d been there and my kids didn’t remember it at all.

They LOVED it.

If you haven’t been recently – or ever – get on over to Falls Park. It’s a lovely way to spend an hour or three – (the kids wanted to spend 4 or 5), it’s free, it’s pretty, it’s fun!

Sioux Falls!

There's even a little bit of history to be learned when you visit and explore the remains of the old buildings on site.

Something for everyone at the falls!

Climb the tower (or ride the elevator!) for a fantastic view!

The view from the tower.

Again with the view.

Nothing like basking in the spray of a waterfall!

Pseudonyms in Blogland

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I have been thinking – for quite awhile – about giving my family pseudonyms in blogland. I read many bloggers who do this – and they all have funny/appropriate/applicable names they have chosen for their loved one. Names which give their family members anonymity, yet also describe their personalities to some degree – I assume!

I love this idea. I love that I then wouldn’t have to call my husband “him/he”, or call my son “my son” or confuse you readers when describing my two daughters.

I have finally arrived – due to a new acquisition in our household – upon my chosen names. It’s only taken me a year.

My husband: The Sailboat King. More about this in a moment.

My son: Jack Pumpkin Head. (He’s 12. Need I say more?) I hope that using this name isn’t an infringement on L. Frank Baum’s copywrite. I tried to check but had no luck on turning anything up.

My oldest daughter: Meep. This has been her nickname for years, so it seemed appropriate.

My youngest daughter: Boo. When I was young we had a cat named Boo. She was a bit feisty. We named (with permission from her soon-to-be owners) one of our current kittens “Calli Boo” and she is an explorer, a runner, a cutie. ‘Nuf said.

Now for the explanation about my husband’s moniker.

I came to my husband a couple weeks ago with a request. A kinda major request that involves free airmiles and being away from home. He, looking slightly relieved and slightly guilty at the same time, said, “I’m glad you asked because I want to ask you something too.”

He wanted permission – my blessing ? – to buy a small sailboat. A Laser, to be exact.

The upshot: I am going out – with the kids – to Washington again this summer, and he went out to Wisconsin – with two of the kids – and bought the boat.

Then, of course, he had to sail it. I forgot that risking his life would be involved in this agreement.

Okay, perhaps I’m exaggerating. He can swim well and he wears his lifejacket. When he remembers.

The only picture I have of The Sailboat King with his boat. Don't worry. There will be more to come in the future!

He took the boat out the first time with his mentor-in-sailing, his boss, sailing alongside in a sailboat of his own. Everything went well.

He then took it out for the second time by himself. In 25 mph northerly winds. To the western end of the lake.

He’s a determined guy.

Two friends, at separate times, passing by on their drive around the lake, stopped to watch as he struggled against God and the wind to get the boat in the water. They, the luckies, drove away. I, on the other hand, had to watch as he tacked across the bay, nearly spilling at least once, and decided that the errands I had meant to run while he sailed would have to wait while I put “911” into my speed dial.

The kids and I sat in the car and winced watched. Finally, after what felt like ages, but really was only about 15 minutes, he came in to shore, happy that he’d proven he could sail in such winds…and freely admitting that he would not likely ever do it again…at least, not on purpose.

I am pleased to say that nothing was wrecked or lost despite the spills the boat took while being launched and landed. I am displeased to say that I had forgotten to reinsert my memory card into my camera so I have no shots to prove any of this ever happened.

The next day we saw one of the friends who had stopped to marvel at The Sailboat King’s tenacity.

He was pleased that The King was still alive.

As am I.

Leftovers

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Why is it that if I preface lunch possibilities with the word, “Leftover” then at least half of my family says an automatic “no thanks” whereas if I say, “Macaroni and Cheese from a box” (which just might happen to be the same thing we had two nights ago) then they’re fine with it?

Why is it that I know that soup, for instance, is even better the next day, but that they haven’t yet learned this? Or, perhaps, they just refuse to believe it?

I have, however, discovered a trick.

If the child makes the food, the child then wants to eat it – even the leftovers!

Isn’t that a great trick? It kills several birds with one stone. 1) They’re learning to cook – a life-skill and a boon to busy mothers everywhere. 2) They’re learning the value of their work and the loss of spoiled (and rejected) food. 3) They’re learning to better appreciate the work that it takes to prepare, present, and clean up after a meal.

At least I fondly think they are.

My nephew made me promise not to post any pictures with his face in them. No, he's not an ogre - just shy, I guess. But his hands were fair game.


When we were out in Washington over Christmas, one of my favorite memories was cooking together with my sister and her family every evening. My sister has a large kitchen – large enough to hold 5 or 6 adults all working in the same space. Not to mention my three kids running around underfoot.

It was the most fun ever. My brother-in-law was grilling outside, though he mostly was inside with us as it was cold out. My sister was making several things at once – dips and batter for onion rings and slicing the onions too, as I recall. My husband was deep-frying the rings. My nephew was making sushi which, if you’ve ever made it, you know is a detailed and many-splendored thing. I was helping him a bit by cutting veggies and tuna with his direct-from-Japan sushi knife which he warned me about with no uncertain words.

It’s very, very, very sharp.

Yeah. It's sharp.


I was also making chocolate chip cookies (though perhaps that was on a different night? I can’t remember – we had several of these wonderful evenings!). I am required, by law, to make Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies LINK for my brother-in-law whenever we visit. I have lived under this law since 8th grade. I always make a double batch, because it’s hardly worth all the work otherwise. I even fried them like pancakes on their woodstove one time when the power was out for 8 days.

Beautiful!


I know that on one of these fun nights, my nephew made whole wheat noodles. And that on another, my nephew-in-law, who had come over for the evening with my niece and great-nephew, was in charge of deep-frying oysters. (If you pull the fryer out, you might as well get a lot of use out of it!)

The kids, during this time, were “helping”.

"Helping" with the scraps of homemade noodles.


As we worked we talked, laughed until our sides ached, and enjoyed each other’s company. It’s not often that we’re together as a family, as Minnesota is a long way from Washington, mores the pity.

The next day we ate the leftovers – the few that there were – and relived the memories of the night before. Those kinds of leftovers will never get old.

Ahhhhhh, the High School Memories

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I made the mistake the other day of opening up my yearbook from my senior year in high school. I say mistake because it pulled me in and whatever it was that I meant to be doing suddenly was forgotten as I flipped through the pages, laughing over pictures, puzzling over handwriting, and cringing over certain memories.

I enjoyed my high school years very much…which is a good thing as I went to three different high schools, transferring two times to schools where I knew no one, and where, after the first move, I was too shy to sit down at lunch with kids I didn’t know so I ate my lunch in a bathroom stall rather than face the unknown and intimidating cafeteria.

I know. Kinda sad and pathetic.

After about a week of that I got to know a few kids and soon I was comfortable, my bathroom lunches forgotten.

I was only in that school for one year – only in that town for 11 months – and then we moved again. In my parent’s defense, no one had expected to move so soon. We had lived for 15 years on Orcas Island, Washington, when circumstances forced us to move to Bend, Oregon. We thought we were there to stay. But then, unexpectedly, Pan American Airlines (which had laid off my father 14 years previously) suddenly recalled all its pilots.

And so we moved to West Berlin, Germany.

That move was far easier than the move to Bend, for several reasons. 1) I realized that eating in the bathroom is stupid. 2) I’d done this once, and, by golly, I could do it again. And 3) Every single student in that school had moved, just as I had, at some point in their lives – often more than once, twice, even three times (they were mostly American military kids) and so they knew what it was like to be new. As a result, they were good at making friends, they understood how I felt, and they were friendly.

Voila! No more bathroom lunches.

The former Berlin American High School - now a German oberschule. I took this in 2011 when I went back to Berlin for a visit.

And so my last two years of high school – in an American school on foreign soil – were fantastic. And here I was now, in my Minnesota living room, remembering all the fun.

Remembering the 6 bomb threats we had in one week, when we’d tromp out to the football field while the bomb-sniffing dogs did their work as casually as Minnesota kids do tornado drills.

Remembering the military Duty Train that we’d have to take across East Germany (at night) whenever we went to sports events or Speech Fest, or Model United Nations events, window blinds pulled down to keep us from seeing anything of their communist utopia.

Remembering the way we could distract our math teacher into telling us stories about his bees rather than telling us about algebra.

Our football field in Berlin - now, I suppose, a "football" field - ie, scoccer!

Remembering being the yearbook editor my senior year and truly learning what taking responsibility means – even if it’s taking responsibility for something I didn’t do.

Yes, those were good years. Great years!

And then, reaching the last few pages of the yearbook, I read this, written by a well-meaning friend:

“Gretchen, you are so awesome. Don’t ever change.”

And I remembered, with a stab of guilt and remorse and bittersweet pain, that I was far from awesome back then. That I had so far to go still, to be anywhere near it.

I remembered how I felt reading those words the first time. Knowing, even then, that I had better change and I had better change fast. Time to grow up. I could not stay 18, and I didn’t want to. 18 is a wonderful age to be…but it’s not nearly as wonderful as 42.

Yes, it’s been 24 years since I graduated from high school. 24 wonderful years.

And, while I’m still far from awesome, I have at least changed.

Thank goodness.

As Near as You Can Get, I Had a Perfect Childhood

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When I was a kid, growing up on Orcas Island, Washington, my father built me a playhouse in the backyard beneath a copse of shady evergreens. It wasn’t a fancy house, just four sheets of plywood, a flat roof, an opening for the doorway, and two windows, one looking south to the house and the second looking north to the cliff and the edge of the world.

Eastsound Bay, on Orcas Island.

I loved that playhouse. I played for hours in its shady interior. I read in there, pretended in there, and played game after game with my best friend who lived across the street, and whose name, believe it or not, was Gretchen.

I loved that playhouse. I played for hours in its shady interior. I read in there, pretended in there, and played game after game with my best friend who lived across the street, and whose name, believe it or not, was Gretchen.

To top off our name-connection, her birthday was six months to the day different than mine, making her exactly 1.5 years older than me. I always thought it was fun to celebrate my half birthday on her real birthday. (Even weirder – our husband’s birthdays, as we discovered years later, are on the same day!)

Gretchen and I would play there often. Barbies, board games, pretend. There was one game we really liked, where you take a piece of paper and one of us would write a sentence on it, then fold it over like a fan so the other couldn’t see what was written, and then we’d pass it back and forth in this manner until the page was filled or we were bored, whichever came first.

Then, of course, you read it out loud and it was hilarious. At least it was to a couple of kids.

A beach on Orcas Island - not "my" beach, but very similar!

But the best thing to do with Gretchen was to play on the beach. Her grandparents had an orange fiberglass rowboat, and we loved to take it out and paddle around, where once we were certain that a sea serpent greeted us but it was probably just a seal and we’d gaze down into the depths at the crabs, kelp, and fishes and I’d pray I wouldn’t fall in because I couldn’t swim. Sometimes we’d wear life jackets…but not always. (And as for bike helmets…what were they?! It’s amazing we survived back in the old days!)

Back on the shore we’d find crabs beneath the rocks and once we gathered them all in a bucket where they fought each other and foamed at the mouth until we let them all go, worried that they’d kill each other in their foamy anger. We’d build fires and roast hot dogs though for some reason we never camped down there, though I did with another friend a time or two. We’d play on the huge boulders and forget about the incoming tide and then have to wade back through the cold, cold water and then, of course, our feet would squelch in our Keds all the way home up the cliff path, our socks falling down and scrunching up beneath our heels.

Gretchen’s grandparents had a wooden set of retractable stairs built down to the beach and sometimes we would take that route home. We’d huff and puff up the 90 foot cliff and then turn at the top and look down at the beach, wanting nothing more than to be back down at the bottom, still playing, still having fun.

We’d always return home sunburned and freckled, our curly hair wild from the wind, our skin salty and our knees bruised from falling on barnacles. Worn out from the day’s activities, that wouldn’t stop us from camping out in Gretchen’s orange tent that night.

Pitched for weeks on her parent’s lawn, that tent was our second bedroom most summers. We’d collapse into our sleeping bags after a good evening of chasing flying termites around the yard with badminton racquets. Aside from the time an inquisitive raccoon (aka a terrible monster in our imaginations) brushed past the tent and scared us to death, we always slept well and woke early, often returning to our haunts of the day before to do it all over again.

It never got old, playing with Gretchen.

I probably have a million stories about those glorious days. Stick around and I’ll tell you them all.

- Gretchen

Lego My Legos!

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I am not sure that there is a better toy in all creation than Lego. Seriously. And yes, I’m a girl.

I don’t know why it is that Lego is considered a “boy” toy. They are making more “girl” Lego now, and in a way that irritates me. Girls don’t need pink bricks in order to enjoy the full goodness that is Lego!

I also have an issue with the fact that it’s almost impossible to buy just plain Lego bricks. I was talking about this with my pastors the other day. (Yes, Lego is a good topic to talk about with pastors – all theology all the time is overrated.) I don’t want so many kits! I don’t want a kit to make the Millenium Falcon, or a set to create Hogwarts Castle. Just give me a plain old box of bricks. (My son loves the kits, though. He definitely would disagree with me on this!)

What I really wish I could get now is the kind of sets I had when I was a kid. The sets of pure, unadulterated Lego bricks. The four-ways (as we called them), the squares, the three-ways, the precious (and fairly new, back in my day) one-ways. Or the skinny pieces, the fat flat pieces, the shingle pieces.

Or what about the clear pieces? Those were precious because I had so few of them. And I needed them because they made the perfect sliding glass doors for my orphanages. That’s right. I was an orphanage architect. That’s what I did with my Legos. I built orphanages for my Fisher Price people.

You know the ones – the wooden ones that, supposedly, caused babies to choke and were discontinued somewhere in the 90’s. I had a lot of those and they all needed places to live. (Yes, I had the Fisher Price houses and such too, but somehow I always had more people than beds.) The idea of them living all together in a giant orphanage was so appealing to me – they had no adult supervision – and they’d go on crazy adventures all over the hearth bench in front of the living room fireplace.

A couple of my old Fisher Price people. Yes...these guys really were mine!


The bummer about building my creations in the living room, was that, inevitably, mom would tire of the mess and I’d have to take it apart…or, conversely, carry it whole down to my bedroom.

That was a bit of a trick. I loved my orphanages and I didn’t want to dismantle them. So I would attempt to move them. Trouble was, I built them out of every single piece of Lego I owned – and they were huge, sprawling mansions, filled with Lego beds, Lego pottys, and Lego floors, all pieced together like many-splendored quilts.

I would take a few steps down the hallway, and, virtually every time without fail, they would fall apart over the indoor garden.

My grandparents built our house and they put in an actual 6 foot long by 4 foot wide indoor garden – full of dirt and plants – which was flanked on either side by glass and which formed the Grand Canyon, the yawning pit of doom, the Lego magnet, which lay between the living room and my bedroom.

Suffice it to say, it’s not too fun digging Lego out of the dirt. I am quite certain that the current owners of the house would have a fairly good Lego collection if they dug up that dirt, thanks to my broken orphanages.

A very simplified version of my old Lego orphanages - mine had high walls, many rooms, and lots of furniture. They were awesome!


I did have an actual pre-fab set or two of Legos. I had the Coast Guard station, and I had a fork lift that ran on a battery. When I opened that on Christmas morning I thought I’d be the one to put it together. I was wrong. My sister and my dad swiped it and they put it together for me that afternoon. I was slightly put-out and slightly pleased, because it meant I didn’t have to follow all those boring directions.

Because, after all, building orphanages took no directions. It was all up to me. Teetering turrets, sliding glass doors, kitchens and bathrooms and closets – I could do anything I wanted with no directions to limit me.

I still don’t like following directions. That’s why I don’t outline when I write. I need space, man! Don’t tie me down!

I do follow recipes, though, because I’ve learned the hard way that when I wing it in cooking it mostly turns out dreadfully.

I bet if I made a Lego cake, though, it would be awesome.

A Writer’s Work is Never Done

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I am writing a book and it is exhausting. I remember hearing my English teachers say such things and I didn’t exactly believe them. I mean, I knew it was a bit of work, getting a piece of writing exactly the way I wanted it. But I knew, too, that the basic writing of ideas came fairly easily to me. So easily that I chose to major in English…a degree which my husband, I might add, does not hesitate to scoff (albeit kindly) at. He’s an engineer…and I can’t deny the fact that he’s the one making the money in this household. Thank God for the scientifically-minded…but, I also have to ask, do we not need the writers to keep us amused? I hope?!

Yes, writing is stressful. But it’s also something I love. I can’t NOT do it. But writing blithely off the top of one’s head is different from editing. I’ve been living in the editing world for so long now that I’m not sure I’ll know how to get out of it…though I won’t have to worry about that for a few more months, at least.

Editing is stressful because, really, is a piece of writing ever really done? Is it ever really perfect?

Perfectionism is a curse and a fallacy when it comes to writing. I truly believe it’s impossible for a writer to ever be totally satisfied with their entire book. One or two phrases here and there may feel almost perfect…but then I worry that I’m somehow blind to their faults, that they’re perhaps overly sentimental or too wordy or that they contain some other horrifying writer’s sin like a run-on sentence or a split infinitive. (What is a split infinitive? I don’t know. But I’ll know it’s wrong if I see it!) And so I fear even those “perfect” phrases. They’re the ones editors tend to CHOP.

In college I wrote a poem titled “Killing my Babies” about that exact thing…cutting out lines that I love but that simply need to go for whatever reason. No, I won’t copy that poem for you here…wouldn’t want to lose any readers due to my terrible collegiate scribbles! (And, by the way, I don’t think that I’d use that title again, having children of my own now. Feels a little distasteful…and overly dramatic. Yet another writer’s sin.)

Yes, writing this book has been intense. I can’t even remember exactly when I started it, but I think that it was 4 ½ years ago. Writing goes slowly when you only have an average of 2 ½ hours twice a week to dedicate to it. (Pre-school and/or napping pre-schooler hours.) The end date is fluid, too, as I am finding out. The reality is, it will never be done…until I’m forced to just simply stop perfecting it due to a publisher’s deadline…which, of course, is what I want! And so, I’m beginning that dreaded hunt to find a publisher and/or an agent. This is the phase of book-writing that I’ve feared and dreaded for years. The phase that has kept me from ever seriously attempting a book before. I’m putting on my thick skin. I’m asking my husband to dedicate some of his hard-earned engineer money to this, and I’m diving into the deep end. And I can’t even swim. But, hopefully, the fact that I’ve edited my brains out will be a life-raft.

I Philosophize about Animals

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When we moved to an acreage almost 7 years ago, people often asked us if we planned on getting animals to fill the empty spaces on our land. “Will you have horses?” they’d ask. “Chickens, perhaps? Or goats?”

“Surely,” they’d say, “you’ll have a dog?”

Somehow, in their thinking, animals just belonged on our ten acre patch of Minnesota.

The truth is, I am not really an animal person. It’s not that I don’t like them…it’s just that I know nothing about them. I grew up with a cat – though I can’t remember what happened to her. She had one kitten, one time. That kitten died on my birthday (a tragedy I have blogged about here) but other than that, I had no pets when I was young.

As for animals like horses or goats, there isn’t a chance I’d ever want one. Too much work, too much bother. Does that sound terrible? I don’t mean it to, it’s just that I don’t want the job of raising and/or caring for an animal…and if I don’t want it, surely it shouldn’t be foisted upon me, right? No one wants an unwilling mother.

And what if that animal got sick? I wouldn’t have the first clue what to do and I’m afraid that it would die all because I was too clueless to know how to help it and I’d feel guilty for the rest of my life that I killed the poor innocent sheep (or whatever) because I was too dumb to know what to do for it.

That just doesn’t sound like fun to me.

When I had children, I learned that I am actually a very selfish creature. Yes, I got up in the middle of the night time after time…and for my babies I was willing to do that…but for an animal, I am not. I am not cut out for feeding lambs three times a night or sitting by the side of a pregnant cow.

Real food for the first time is kind of messy!


Some people are made for the animal life. I respect, love, and appreciate these people. I pet their dogs. I admire their hedgehogs. I truly am impressed by their commitment.

Heck, I even drink the milk from their cows.

But there are other people who aren’t cut out for animal husbandry. And, quite frankly, I think the animals are better off without me.

All this being said, I absolutely love the look of chickens pecking around in my neighbor’s front yard. I love ducks strutting across the landscape, and the idea of fresh eggs.

I just don’t want to have to take care of them.

So, the answer to the question of whether or not we’ll have animals on our acreage is an unequivocal “no”. We have a cat. The neighbor Tom came over for a visit, and she now has kittens which we all love and know how to care for. That makes me happy and content.

I’m even enjoying taking cute kitten photos.

But that’s enough for this girl.

The moral of the story:
You can take a girl to the country. But you can’t force her into 4-H.

Intrepid explorer.




One Moment in Time

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I did not like my first grade teacher. Not one little bit. I am not quite sure why she chose teaching as a profession because I don’t think she liked any of us, either. I admit that I went into the year with a bad feeling, due to the things I’d heard about her. She quickly proved the stories were well-founded if not entirely true.

Like the time, right after Christmas vacation, when she was asking us all what we had done over the holiday. For me, Christmas was already in the distant past and my birthday – on the third of January – was far bigger on my mind. I told her – and this was in front of the whole class, mind you – that I’d celebrated my birthday with my family. I was very excited, and smiling.

She asked me if I’d had a birthday party. My smile slipped a little. I said “no”. She asked me why. I said I didn’t really know and by now my smile was entirely gone. She then said, and I quote (at least as it appears from my memory), “You’re supposed to have parties and invite your friends. That’s only fair because they invite you to theirs.”

I then proceeded to cry.

The truth was, we didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up, and spending funds on things like birthday parties wasn’t really high on the priority list. I don’t think it really ever bothered me except for that year. We always had great celebrations as a family and I was never deprived of anything! Suddenly my teacher made everthing seem otherwise.

But that wasn’t the end of my teacher’s meanness. Later on in the year we were learning how to do macramé. Remember that stuff? You braided rope in a certain way to make things like decorative flowerpot holders, or wall hangings.

Well, we had made a short macramé thing, and my friend and I stayed in at recess one day to finish up our second macramé project. Why we were allowed to stay in alone in the classroom, I do not know. We got our projects to the same length they’d been with the first project, and then we wondered, “Why is it that our rope still is so much longer?” We shrugged our shoulders and decided to cut the rope to the “proper” length and be done with it. Wouldn’t our teacher be proud of us?

She wasn’t. In fact, she yelled – at me in particular for some reason, even though we’d BOTH done it – there, in front of the entire class, she hollered.

“Why did you cut your rope?” She refrained from saying, “you idiot”, though I’m sure she was thinking it.

“Ummm, we thought we were supposed to?”

“Well, you weren’t. You ruined it. Your entire craft is destroyed.”

And then she threw it in the garbage.

I opened my mouth to retaliate. To tell her off. To chew her out. I literally opened my mouth…

…because you see, the one fantasy I had imagined over and over that year was telling off my teacher. I imagined up conversation after conversation, where I brought her to task, gave her what for, told her my opinion of her and her meanness.

And here, in real life, was the perfect time to truly live my fantasy.

So I opened my mouth, all ready to say the things I had imagined over and over and over.

And then a little voice inside my head said, “Shut your mouth, Gretchen. Now.”

And I did. I literally shut my mouth. I kept silent. I kept out of the principal’s office.

I have been known, even today, to imagine up retaliatory conversations with people who have ticked me off. Only now I know that’s probably not the most healthy way to spend my time.

I have even been known to open my mouth and actually say the things I’m thinking – though I almost always regret it later.

Funny how I remember that moment in time – as if, somehow, I’m a different person because I kept my mouth shut that day than if I’d opened it and gotten into trouble.

“Two roads diverged in a wood…” and I took the one less controversial. And that has been the story of my life.

Bordering on Blasphemy

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I cannot sew. I have mentioned this before, I know, but I’m not sure that I have made it truly clear that to call myself a sewer would be to border on blasphemy.

My woeful sewing skills came to a head this fall when my sisters and I set out to make a quilt for our mother for Christmas.

Allow me to explain a couple of things.

My oldest sister is a fabulous seamstress. She makes marvelous quilts and crafts and clothes. She makes them quickly, and she makes them perfectly. She has a new sewing machine that can make anything except dinner.

Our other sister is a fabulous crafter. She carves, sculpts, glues, cuts, welds, and owns an excavator. What this has to do with sewing I don’t know, I just felt compelled to point it out.

She also sews.

And then there’s me. An optimist who thinks she can sew but really can’t. An optimist who once made a quilt without a pattern (because I’m too lazy to follow directions) and who forgot how to thread her sewing machine because it had been sitting idle for approximately 8 years.

My quilt had zero diagonals, zero tricks. I walked into Hobby Lobby, bought a bunch of fabric I liked, went home and made the quilt. I added two borders because I wanted it larger.

I am rather good with borders. Nice, easy, straight lines – I can handle that.

The quilt I made 8 years ago, sans pattern.

So my sister – the sewer – asks me if I think I can participate in The Great Quilt Project for Mom. I said yes.

(Remember: I’m an optimist.)

She sent a packet of instructions and cut fabric, oh, maybe August. Lots of time before Christmas.

I sat on it for, oh, maybe 4 months. (Remember: I’m lazy. I’m also a procrastinator. I’m also a people-pleaser. None of these things made for a good situation come last Thanksgiving when I finally admitted to myself, “Shoot. I can’t possibly do this.…”)

My sister – the sewer – had said to me when she sent the squares, “Just let me know if you can’t do it, mail the stuff back, and that will be fine.”

She’s very kind and very wise.

And so, along came Thanksgiving, which, as you know, is close to December, which, as you know, is the month wherein lies Christmas…and the due date of this surprise quilt.

I called my sister. “I can’t do it!!!!!!”

“I told you that if you couldn’t do it to just let me know.” She is NOT cross, she is NOT hollering, she is NOT even being quiet and fuming. She was possibly laughing to herself; I’m not sure.

So I mailed back the packet of fabric, the directions, the carefully cut strips of fabric in pristine zip-lock bags, the brand-new roller blade thingy for my rolly-cutter thing….

Too bad I couldn’t mail back the 4 months I’d sat on the project.

When we went out to Washington to be with my family for Christmas, my dear sister – the sewer – sat beside me while I sewed – in nice, easy, straight lines – the border for the quilt, on her fabulous new sewing machine that can make anything except perhaps procrastinators hurry.

I had border experience, after all.

She allowed me – nay, WANTED me – to do this so that we could say we all three made the quilt for Mom.

Do I have a wonderful sister, or what?

I have, as a matter of fact, two wonderful sisters. Their quilt squares were so fantastic I can’t even tell you.

My borders set them off perfectly.

The quilt in question - along with (from left to right) the excavator-driving sister, the sewing sister, and our mama. Isn