Blocks

My friend Rob is  much on my mind these days.  It's been two months since he died, a  dear friend of 49 years lost to  cancer.   Even though I didn't see Rob often after we graduated from college,  I feel haunted by the loss of  him.   Laura, my good friend who's also a therapist, says that each death stirs up memories of other deaths.  This feels right to me.  I'm preoccupied not only with Rob but with my mother, who died 19 years ago.

I'm a quilter, and I've been working on a quilt that is all about green vines.  Apparently.   It's going nowhere.  The other day, I suddenly had an image in my mind of a new quilt block, completely unrelated to vines. I thought, what the hell, and rummaged around in my fabric collection. Then I sewed what I saw in my mind's eye:

  I felt better.  After I stared at that block for a few days and tried to figure out how to incorporate it into a "real" quilt, a bed quilt, I gave up. My hand reached for other fabrics:

The hand-dyed fabric in the center has the suggestion of a horizon.  I can't tell you what this block means exactly, but I can tell you it's in synch with how I feel about Rob right now, that he's just off-shore, in the amorphous blue. When my mother died, I collected pictures of rowboats, and sewed paper xerox copies of them onto plain gray fabric.  I was comforted by the image of her rowing to heaven.