So, I've taken up the rug hooking again that my mom bought me last year. I swear this project is going to take me forever. I do enjoy the meditative state that the repetitive poke and pull can get me into. Cup of hot chocolate with homemade marshmallows by my side, cozy in my warm house, maybe the smell of something hearty on the stove or sweet baking in the oven. OR, Chinese take-out in my belly. The soft feel of the wool that I'm weaving into a picture. An appropriate message "Rain, Rain, Go Away..."
Each new section I complete makes me feel closer to my mom. Rug hooking was one of the first creative endeavors, aside from cooking, that I watched her take up. She's good at it and yet she's very critical of her pieces. I've learned something about myself through watching her struggle with her own perfectionism.
It's also been something that I've desperately wanted her to teach me. Desperately, because I feel her mortality tugging at me this year. She has been diagnosed and undergoing treatment for colon cancer. It's colored everything I've experienced since the night she called to tell me they'd found a mass on her colon and would go in for surgery two days later. Missouri has never felt so far away to me. It's made making my own little home and my connection to this plot of land tenuous feeling. Hooking the rug, I weave my thoughts about our relationship, my relationship to this house, to my history, tangible. It anchors them to the linen. Invisible to the viewer, but embedded there for me.
I'm new to this.
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