Granny Fricket's Thicket

One of my besties shared with me a link to a picture that filled my heart with wonder… it had a poem that filled me with a magical passion for a project.

Ginger Ackley (amazing woman, crone, fairy, award winning pagan musician, and fiber artist) shared with me this link. https://www.facebook.com/groups/658938784170142/?multi_permalinks=7712126072184676&ref=share

It is a public post so most people should be able to see it. If not… here it is

Girl God Books
Based in Norway  · April 3 at 7:00 PM  · 

“The old threads are unraveling,
Get your needles ready.
We are stitching a new quilt
of Humanity.
Bring your old t-shirts,
worn out jeans, scarves,
antique gowns, aprons,
old pockets of plenty
who have held Earth’s treasures,
stones, feathers, leaves,
love notes on paper.
Each stitch
A mindful meditation.
Each piece of material
A story.
The more colour the better,
so call in the Tribes.
Threads of browns, whites,
reds, oranges
Women from all nations
start stitching.
Let’s recycle the hate, the abuse,
the fear, the judgment.
Turn it over, wash it clean,
ring it out to dry.
It’s a revolution
of recycled wears.
Threads of greens, blues, purples
Colourful threads
of peace, kindness,
respect, compassion
are being stitched
from one continent to the next
over forests, oceans, mountains.
The work is hard
Your fingers may bleed.
But each cloth stitched together
Brings together a community.
A world, our future world
Under one colourful quilt.
The new quilt of humanity.”

—Julia Myers

Art by Yulia Ustinova

Humanity… it lays heavy on my heart. So many people just… I don’t know… don’t see that the worls is filled with stories and everyone’s story is… everyone’s story. Everyone hurts. Everyone bleeds. Everyone has joys. And every day is magical in its own right if you look for it.

It didn’t take long for this to lay heavy on my heart. I want to make something made from the stories (the fiber pieces and the stories of the people that they belonged to) to write the story of humanity.

Will I end up with a quilt made from one shirt? Probably. I also am jaded enough to believe that no one wants to share their story. I’m also realistic enough to know that if there is something that someone has that has a story tied to it in any way, they won’t want to part with the thing, or probably the story.

But I NEED to start. And I need to try.

So here is mine…

This was bear’s shirt. He wore it to the first ever Pulmonary Fibrosis Awareness walk in Cleveland.

It was his first awareness walk. It was his last. Snickers was just a baby (5 months old) but he was already such a big part of my life, our lives. Pulmonary Fibrosis is when your lungs start to develop scar tissue and start to stop expanding and contracting the way normal lungs do. There are treatments. There is no cure. It is fatal, and if someone dies of pulmonary fibrosis, they suffocate because their lungs stop being able to expand and contract and they can no longer breathe. It is a horrible, scary way to die. If you are lucky enough to not die from it but from something else… living with it is just as scary. You start to cough all the time. You stop being able to process oxygen the right way and you start to live with constant oxygen.

In the picture, he is wearing his portable concentrater. It kept him mobile for a long time… before he had to switch to bottled just to keep his levels where he wasn’t light headed and dizzy and causing more damage to his body. At home, we had big blue (we named his concentrater) where we could adjust the flow up or down depending on what he was doing and how he was feeling (and how his levels were).

The most horrible sound in the world was the sound of the silence that filled the house the morning we turned off big blue for the last time. October 16, 2020. He was lucky. It was “simply” heart failure. His heart just couldn’t take the strain any more of existing. He got all of his wishes but one. He died in his sleep. He didn’t suffer at the end (although he was terrified his last day). I was the last face he saw. The only thing he didn’t get was to live to January 1 so I could claim him on my taxes.

And then October 31, 2023, Snickers died too.

They are both gone and some days it is so hard to just get through the day. It gets less hard. It never gets easy.

I hope people will share ‘things’ with me. I hope my quilt is not just one shirt and a doily (more on that later).

For now… I will cut my memories into farn (fabric yarn) and start this journey

Would you like to come along for the ride? I’ll post everything I can here (everything people are willing to share).

Wish me luck.

Granny