62 and week 9

She draws:

And I stitch:

~~~~~~~

I’m changing things up a bit this week.

Instead of posting the Sunday Seven,
I’m posting the project in its entirety to date
– all 62 pieces –
stretched out on the path that leads
to the top of the falls.

It’s part of Nina-Marie’s Off the Wall Friday.

As a little girl,
my mother and I exercised with Jack LaLanne.
holding onto the back of a chair
while we squatted down then stood back up.

I’m sure that’s now deemed harmful,
but that’s what we did
and that’s what I thought of
as I bent to place each cloth
and bent again to retrieve each cloth.

As I looked at the cloths stretching up the path,
I thought about living
and dying
and compost
and how one day these cloths
will become part of the earth
just as Nancy and I will.

Is she visited by such thoughts, our Nancy?

I can’t know for sure
and it seems rather arrogant
for me to speak for her,
but it seems to me
that she’s far too busy
living,
taking it
one day at a time.

~~~~~~~~~

She is my developmentally disabled sister-in-law, Nancy,
and I am Jeanne, the woman who flat-out loves her.
Go here to start at the beginning and read your way current.
And there’s a pinterest board, too.