Christmas Stitches
I talk a lot about grief. A very smart person once told me to write the things I knew about and nothing more. I know a lot about grief. So, this column today will hereby be crowned a quilt column. I’m going to sew many thoughts together for you, bits and scraps of emotions, many of which I probably mentioned here before. Then, I’m going to apply a decorative stitch on top to hold the sentiments together. It won’t be one of the quilts you see at the State Fair each year, not a hummingbird with a first place ribbon displayed in the corner or a wedding ring pattern with an intricate border. My quilt is a crazy quilt with random shards of fabric scraped up off the floor and haphazardly and thrown together with no respect for matching colors or proper geometric shapes. After all, that’s one of the things grief does for you. The aesthetics stop mattering as much. Sometimes, for a bit, everything stops mattering as much. When you read this, Christmas will be upon us. Chairs will be empty this year. Some are due to those of us still choosing to social distance. Some are due to deaths from Covid. Some are due to other tragedies. It is a very different Christmas, as has been the entirety of 2020. Sometimes we don’t know what to say to someone in a season of grief. That’s where I become an award winning quilter. Let me stitch you out of this.