Sally Ride Science

7:00PM - "The Road Home" presentation with Q&A session/trunk show Concordia Lutheran Church, Kirkwood, MO.  Thanks again to my friend Hallye Bone for connecting me with Thimble and Thread.  A very special thanks to Serena Crisp for her extraordinary hospitality and kindness (and that yummy snack plate).

7:00PM - "The Road Home" presentation with Q&A session/trunk show Mulford Evangelical Free Church, 2400 Hershey Ave, Muscatine IA The ladies and gentleman of Muscatine Melon Patchers are an exceptionally enthusiastic audience.  It was truly a pleasure to spend the evening with them.  Thank you...especially to the member who mentioned our connection through a mutual (late) friend, Reggie Cihla.  How very special - and what a small world it is.  We are all connected!  Also, thanks to the "Ladder Ladies" who held up my quilts for the guild to see.

7:00PM - "The Road Home" presentation with Q&A session/trunk show Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, Court Street & 1st Avenue, Iowa City, IA. So glad my parents could join me for the first time and my Aunt Alice for the second time.  The Old Capitol Guild was a great audience - which included several friends - Linzee Kull-McCray, Stef Rose, Danette Angerer, and Nancy Lackender (owner of Inspirations quilt shop in Hills, Iowa).  Was also pleased to have Dee Grems in attendance.  Dee is a pediatric nurse at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics (UIHC) where she specializes in cleft lip and palate repair surgeries.  For the past six years Dee has joined Iowa's Miles of Smiles on a trip to Guatemala where many lives are changed forever by the philanthropic work they do to repair cleft lips and palates of those who would likely otherwise never receive such services.   Aunt Alice, me, Maxine (Mom) and Larry (Dad) Hanging Smokehaus Rose

7:00PM - "The Road Home" presentation with Q&A session/trunk show First Presbyterian Church, W. Welsh & S. Highland Streets, Williamsburg, IA It was great to present "The Road Home" to the Iowa County Heartland Quilters in Williamsburg, Iowa!  Williamsburg was the first place I lived when I moved to Iowa in 2001.  My quilt career moved forward leaps & bounds while living there.  Living in a small town was rather lonely, but gave me lots of time to create quilts.

I bought a new shower curtain on Saturday.  The one with the PVC.  Not because it was the cheapest, but for the smell.  An olfactory trip back to the most highly anticipated day of my childhood year - Christmas!  The smell of new toys.  Plastic toys.  That just-opened burst of chemical off-gassing.  So many presents!  Big Jim and all his macho man accessories.  Tents, campers, motorcycles, race cars, tree stumps.  Each was individually packaged in its own plastic isolette, ready to serve a supporting role in my ever expanding action-adventure tableau.  Occasionally my sister would invite me across the hallway to play Barbies.  She’d already be set up in the largest open floor space of her lavender bedroom, between the foot of her bed and the double closets that spanned the north wall.  From the floor, the vertical lines of the closet doors shot up to the ceiling above her Lively Livin’ dream house like two colossal high-r...

Rose Garden, Lynn Anderson, 1970 Birthdays are bittersweet. Most holidays are. The awkward silence of family get-togethers; so much of me, unable to attend. Advent calendars were my favorite part of Christmas. Those little swinging doors, patiently opened one day at a time, marked my jubilant, albeit Protestant progression towards the Nativity. Immaculate birth. Virgin Mary. Joseph getting short shrift for his role in the matter. In March of 1989, I traveled to Montreal to meet my mother again.  We’d had no contact since our last on February 2, 1968.  I didn’t know I had a younger brother until just a few weeks before my trip. Lying on a trundle bed next to him on the first of my four-night stay, he told me that every year on my birthday, our mother locked herself in her bedroom and murmured sounds of crying would drift through the walls. The bathroom was the only room in our two-story house with a lock on the door.  It was a legitimately private space where Mom...

Shortly after moving into my [former] studio at Prentiss & Burlington Streets in Iowa City, I started tuning into the pirate radio station broadcasting from the space across the hall. It featured everything from raw urban rap, to stories read by a gentle-voiced young woman. Without enough DJ’s for 24/7 programming, the station often resorted to long stretches of prerecorded sets and large doses of dead air. I rarely saw any of the other artists, musicians (including Iris Dement - how did I miss her?), or DJ’s that worked in the building. When I did, we exchanged little more than a terse, under-the-breath “hull-oh.” Eventually, I passed a young woman in the hall who offered me a flier advertising her radio show. It revealed she was the storytelling DJ I’d heard. She was authentically funky, far beyond the usual Iowa City fare, softened by her intoxicating smile. The daily walk from my parking spot to the studio led me under a concrete railroad bridge-cum-unsanctioned gallery of loca...