Step Four: Dreams and memories...

Dear Fi,

Right now I’m listening to Eddie Vedder’s Into The Wild. I have about 20 minutes before I have to  pick up my daughter from preschool, then I will have about an hour before I have to pick up my son from kindergarten. After lunch I will try to figure out how to manage my, lately neglected, studies. I also need to figure out what to cook for dinner. My husband will be back home earlier today because Amelie has dance class and Bruno has piano lessons on Tuesdays and I cannot be in two places at the same time (not yet ha, ha). After the dance class I won’t come back home, as I usually do, but I will spend about 2 hours in line with other parents from my community, trying to sign up my daughter for the next year of preschool. The registration ends at 8 PM, it takes “only” two hours because it is for the children who are already attending the program. Ah! isn’t this exciting?

I remember three years ago, when I was signing up my son for the first time. The registration started at 5PM, however the rumor was that the year before people started to line up at 9 AM. My husband didn’t go to work that day. I decided to be there early because I had no other choice of preschool. I was at the community centre at 8AM and already number three. People who came at noon were told to sign up to a waiting list. I was sitting from 8 AM until 5 PM in a small room with the other determined parents who were lucky enough to be able to take time off from work, or to find somebody to stay with their kids while they spent their whole day waiting.

Fi, I have no idea why I’m writing about all of this to you... ha, ha! Probably because it is that time of the year when, if you have a child, you need to make plans and decisions for the coming September. And I just cannot imagine my September right now! I don’t know how other parents deal with their work and the schools. My husband works, I will start my practicum this September, and as of now I have no one to help me with dropping off and picking up my children to and from Grade 1 and preschool. And of course the school is in a different community, and starts at different hours, and I have no clue where my practicum will be... I know... sounds so boring, but this is the part of my life I’m dealing with right now...



Also, I do not have much to say about today’s artwork. I actually worked on it yesterday because there was no way to do it today. It is an illustration for one of the chapters of Patti Digh’s new book. Actually, I hope it will be, there are a lot of other people engaged in this project and I have no idea if they will choose my artwork or not. I don’t know how much I can say about this project either. The only thing I can tell you for sure is the fact that the title of this post has nothing to do with the title of the chapter I illustrated. However, the artwork is my interpretation of Patti’s title. I just tried to convince myself that if the opportunity for publishing my artwork presented itself right now it will be better to jump in instead of chickening out ;) So I hope that the last sentence of this paragraph covers at least the “dreams” ;)

My Dear, I don’t have much time to spend on explaining the “memories” part. However, I would like to share what is going on on my side of the world. I didn’t tell you this yet but memories of my grandmother started popping out since the beginning of our collaboration. At first I thought that it was because I started to use the needle again, and my grandma was a master of embroidery. I honestly don’t remember the very fact of being taught, but I have many memories of me and her in our old kitchen sitting together and working on our own projects. Doing creative things was so natural at that time. Actually... it was an every day task. While creating this piece for today's post I could see us so vividly in that old kitchen... Me, maybe six years old, doing my tiny Czech glass beads and her with an amazing patience and grace creating another breathtaking tablecloth...

You’ve asked me once about the colours. I said that I feel like I’ve always had a sense of colour. However, today I realized that ever since I can remember I was surrounded by the beauty of colours and patterns my deaf grandmother was creating every day. And in these silent moments of creating I feel like I connect with her, like we are both working to express ourselves again.

:*

Sylvia