Finishing

I had a post all written up last week and I just needed to take some pictures.  But it wasn’t my best writing and I kind of felt like I was phoning it in, so I didn’t publish it.  Then a friend of mine died.

It wasn’t unexpected.  She’d been fighting cancer for 3 years and had just entered hospice care.  Still…it hurt.  Sandy (not Falling Like Rain Sandy) was one of my many e-maginary friends – people I’ve met through various internet forums.  She was a fellow homeschooling mom of two boys, 9 and 11 years old.  She was also a knitter.  After she died I spent some time looking at her Ravelry (an online knit and crochet community) profile.  I recognized a few of her finished projects as being gifts that she made for others while she was going through chemo.  She was just that kind of a person.

I also looked through her queue of projects she had wanted to make.  It was sad, seeing the hope for the future there in a line of anticipated projects.  Who were they going to be for?  Feeling rather morose, I looked at my own Ravelry queue and got even sadder looking at the projects I’ve never started.  Sweet baby projects that I’d intended for Pipsqueak who grew too fast, as babies tend to do, and now it is too late for those sweaters and hats. Hope and loss, life and death.

I got to thinking Sandy leaving her children and what sorts of things she wished she had the time to do with them. I thought about leaving my own children – but I just couldn’t go there.  I did think about the many things I’ve promised to with or for them.  I thought about how Sandy was just one year older than I am.  I’m sure she once thought she had all the time in the world.  So I declared 2012 to be the Year of the Finished Project.  Home projects, craft projects, projects for the children.  I’m not going to stress myself out with deadlines, but I am going to keep a running list of things I want to do.

Most importantly, I’m going to do them.

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