On Thursday night, Mark and I went to a venue downtown because several Fresno Unified art classes had an art display, including fifth grade classes from the elementary school that Gabe and Ruby attend.
The art was very well displayed. We just missed Gabe and the family, but we were able to talk to the art teacher as well and learn a little more about the technique.
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Quite a few years ago, I found an Etsy seller, Fancy That Designs, who had designed tea towels with words from old familiar hymns as the design. I always meant to start collecting them with the goal of making a quilt. But it never happened.
Then she was signed by a fabric company for a new fabric line, and Songbook was created. I bought a fat quarter bundle of the entire line and a panel that including the hymn designs, similar to the tea towels.
I came across the pattern called Firm Foundation by Anna of My Wandering Path, which used the panels and fabric from the line. You can see more great photos and read the story behind the quilt design here.
While I didn't take any photos during the construction phase, we took the quilt out for some photos. It was Mark's idea to go to First Congregational Church, or Big Red Church as it is lovingly called. It was the perfect rusty red for the background. And I had forgotten about the beautiful green arch over the front door--also the perfect sage green.
The backing fabric is from the second Songbook fabric line, Songbook: A New Page, which has snippets of lines from many different hymns.
So...here we are in March, and although there isn't much, I will catch up with the second half of February.
One evening in February, Christa went to a painting party at church. Aaron and the boys were spending the weekend in Joshua Tree, and Charlotte had other plans. So Ella and I had our own painting party. I got out a watercolor set and we had a good time. I really like her improv painting.
My father's memorial service was yesterday. Being the end of the line of 11 siblings, making me one of the youngest of all the cousins, and the fact that many of my parents' friends had already passed away, we were not sure what attendance would be like.
The service was held at the funeral home and I believe my father would have been very happy with it all.
He had left very specific instructions: No slide show. Limit service to 45 minutes to one hour. Do not print eulogy in program bulletin.
I actually lost my father over six years ago, to that insidious disease known as Alzheimer's, so his passing has affected me much differently than when my mother died 4 1/2 years ago. It was hard for my mother to make the decision to put him in a memory care facility here in Fresno in August 2016 but she could not care for him. A few months later, she decided she no longer wanted to live alone and they moved to a room in a retirement center in Reedley, about 45 minutes from Fresno. That was hard on her, as they downsized from a lovely three-bedroom home to a single room. Added to the difficulty for my mother--she did not have memory issues but she was now living in the memory care unit. She never complained but I know it was harder than I could even imagine. Yet she wanted to spend whatever time she could living with my dad. Shortly after she passed away in August 2018, he required care beyond just memory issues and he was transferred to the skilled nursing section. He always recognized Mark and me when we visited, but if you asked him later that day when he last saw his daughter, he would tell you that I had not come by to visit him in years.
He was well taken care of, but he was so lonely and missed my mother so much. The pandemic only served to make him even lonelier. He never understood what was happening, why we could not come see him in person, and when we finally could, why we always had to wear masks.
On Monday, February 13, he was taken to the hospital. He was still somewhat responsive when Mark and I arrived. We were able to Facetime my brother in Washington, DC, so he could say goodbye. Then he lapsed into unawareness. I'm so glad we were able to spend time with him before he passed away peacefully.
He reached the age of 95, although if you asked him how old he was, he would tell you that he was born in 1927--he never forgot what year he was born--and that he was 101. "YOU do the math." We never argued with him, but he would not have liked this photo (taken in 2020), because when I took it, he would never have believed that he was only 93! I'm sure he thought he was at least 96 by this time.
My father was one of 14 siblings, although by the time I was born, three had passed away (one at age 2, one under a year, and a sister at age 18), so all of my life he was next to the youngest of 11.
He grew up on a farm, with little money but a lot of love in his family. He went to seminary and pastored his first church in City Terrace, an Hispanic area of Los Angeles. He went on to pastor churches in Enid, Oklahoma, Phoenix, and Seattle, before retiring from the ministry and moving back to Fresno.
My father loved music, and I know my love of classical music comes from him. One of my fondest memories is when he built his own amplifier from a kit. I remember him sitting at a card table for hours at our home in Oklahoma, with all the small pieces in little sections of egg cartons. He was also a master woodworker and built many pieces of furniture in our home. His wood of choice was always maple and he and my mother loved the "early American" style of furniture, so he became an expert at using a lathe. I remember later that the amplifier he put together was installed in a beautiful console he built that also housed a turntable and speakers.
He went through many creative phases. I still have a few pieces of decopage. One of my prized possessions is an absolutely exquisite needlepoint picture. He earned extra money during retirement by doing upholstery. I like to think that one of the best things I inherited from him was the love of creating.
He was a writer, and spent several years writing a book called The Waters Run Deep: A Family Story of Triumph Over Adversity, a book that went back six generations and traced his family's migration from western Europe to Prussia (modern-day Poland) and from there to Russia and then to America. It told the story of his parents and how they moved from Oklahoma to Kansas, Michigan and California, and finally the story of his personal boyhood years, growing up on a farm near Dinuba, California.
He loved his family, and I'm grateful that the youngest, Ella and Gabe, have memories of him, as he spent hours playing games and doing puzzles with them while Levi and Charlotte took piano lessons from my mother.
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Several people, after seeing the snow sculpture from last week, wondered if the dragon won third place, what did first and second place look like? So here you go. I'm not sure which is first and which is second--they are both really good. However, I still think the dragon should have come in first.
