Last night, gobsmacked by gratitude . . . [1]
Exopermaculture [2] January 5, 2013
Partially opened curtain. Notice the yellow part, it’s shorter to fit over the counter top.
Last night, around 8 p.m., I had just closed the wonderful new double-sided curtain that separates the light-filled living room with the firebox from the kitchen and den to create a place of warm enclosure when needed and an open space other times, when I was gobsmacked by gratitude. An inner upwelling that just about made me fall into a faint as I moved between the firebox and my favorite fabulous chair for an evening of winter reading. This was just after the wondrous movie I had just watched, which may have had something to do with my mood.
Also, in there somewhere, I had received an email from Daniel, a young man in the neighborhood who had designed and constructed a small bench and gifted it to the GANG garden. We had decided to put it out next to some bushes on the street corner, where a young mother stands with her grammar school-aged children while waiting for the bus. The kids loved to sit on it.
Then, one day the bench was gone. GONE! Stolen? I assumed so, since this corner also happens to be the one where the shooting took place inside the house across the street less than two months ago.
NOT! Daniel had taken it back home. Since it was outside the garden fence, he thought we didn’t want it. We were both ecstatic: he realized that we do love his bench; and I realized that nobody had stolen it.
So I figure that email exchange also enters in as part of the atmospheric intensity that led to being gobsmacked by gratitude.
Now back to the story of the curtain:
Made out of some kind of blanket material, not felt, but feels like it, and costing about $100 for just the cloth, that curtain took two Christmas vacations to complete. My daughter-in-law Sue started the project last Christmas. Sometime over the summer, Stephanie, our GANG garden director last season, put in the grommets. And in order to do that, she had to go back to the store to exchange the original grommets, which were too small. All along, the project seemed gargantuan and ponderously slow moving . . .
The final act was hemming it. On the day after their arrival from Massachusetts, Sue dragged out the trusty little sewing machine that I bought at a yard sale and have no idea how to run (yet?). BTW: Sue’s small-town Ohio Mom is a fount of old knowledge: gardening, sewing, mending, all sorts of skills that we have lost and need to regain. I’m hoping Sue can glean most of this treasure from her Mom before she dies.
The gratitude that rolled through me was embellished by these bits of memory — including the awkwardness that such a large swatch of material entailed, of me putting the unfinished curtain away, twice, in its own box, awaiting completion, of Sue’s generous offer to finish it during the short three days they were here Christmas 2012.
Such a difference this one curtain (with all its memories) makes! Such luxury! My heart is still, the next morning, gobsmacked with gratitude.