Now in my late 50's as I move in the direction towards 60, a new awareness enters my mind; my husband will be retiring in the next 4-5 years even if we can't afford it. It is cliched to say, but so true "how quickly time has passed." How I wish blogs were around as my children were growing up so I could have written cute stories & posted all their photos day by day - documenting their life & mine. But alas although personal computers were around when my youngest was born & they were beginning to exist while my eldest son was in elementary school, we were documenting on old film cameras and on video tape; even then often only for special events or during vacations. I definitely was not one of those mothers who kept up a baby book as my children grew, but at least at a certain point I started taking a lot of photos even if they did not end up in an album, although on occassion they did. It was not until I had an iPhone 3GS that I really dicovered digital photography, and blogs of course have been a recent development.
I was surprised when my older son told me that I was very adept at computers in both my use of the web & my iPhone usage. He then continued to remind me how I had been his computer teacher when he was in elementary school & had taught him beginning programing using turtle graphics & the Basic language, as well as allowing the children to create stories & the drawings on the old Apple IIes long before anyone except early computer geeks in the mid 80's had personal computers in their homes. He was reminding me that although many people who are my age have had to learn to use a computer in their work that their use came after my pioneering exploration of computers in the early to late 1980's. Of course as I had spent a life not just being a mother, but also working in the movement field & dance, as well as working with & advocating for children & their families, I did not stay in the computer field & dropped behind. Yet now I see what a wonderful tool it is for documenting a life or many lives & cannot help but think how wonderful it would be to both document my life & my children's lives through photos from the past slowly being scanned in as well as using the reflective written word.
I was lucky as I was a child growing up that I heard many stories of my mother as a child & young woman & my maternal grandmother while we sat and had lunch, dinner or tea together and the two of them would reminice, but now with both gone I have so many more questions I would like to ask them and how I wish they had written down more about their lives that I could read now for I would like to know so much more now. And while I asked my mom to write about her life while she was in her 70's & early 80's, she never took me up on it.
I asked my father once when I was 14 about his life & if he had pursued & found what he wanted in life & while he told me through barely a few sparce sentences that he had not, he did not go into much detail and we in many ways ended up strangers. How nice it would be to have a fuller picture of his life than the rough sketches & outline I have of him. So now I think of going through boxes & scanning in photos of my past & my children's past & slowly filling in through words, our history together & apart. I don't know if they will ever be interested nor do I think that matters as it may not be until they may be quite a bit older, perhaps my age now, that they might even wonder about my life for a flicker of an instant, but they might enjoy seeing & reading about the time that they were growing up through my eyes. Often when I ask my youngest son if he remembers when..., he tells me "no" so he may want at some point to read about himself and of course many people love looking at photos from when they were little so I am thinking about actually creating a blog about the past & blending it in with the present since I can't document my children's lives & my own as so many young mothers are doing currently. (The inspiration for the above thoughts came after I had just finished reading Christopher's & Tia's blog about their little family before beginning to write here, How jealous I am that famiies can now do this kind of journaling as they go through life & not leave all the clutter doing so.)
In the meantime, before I start hunting up photos from the past as well as writing about it, today I slept in & caught up on some sleep before I began my second ever granny square out of some beautifully mixed coloured fibers out of strands of merino wool and silk as well as other sources I had bought at Yarnia.(Yarnia is a store where you can make up your own mixture of different types of colours and materials on one spool.)
I had seen a photo of a book on Facebook posted by a friend called "The Granny Square Book - Timeless Techniques & Fresh Ideas For Crocheting Square by Square" by Margaret Hubert.
Funny enough as I was looking at this crochet book, I met one of the very active members of the Crochet Liberation Front who was very excited that some of the crochet patterns she had created were going to be published in a book, while at the same time she was discouraged that there were only a few patterns among the various yarn stores participaing in the crawl for crocheters. We talked about how we would have to change this situation for next years crawl, while exchanging personal information and giving me a new source of crochet patterns & community. As I went to put the book back on the shelf, I did not see the two other copies of the book that stood there originaly when I had pulled down my copy of the book to look at it so I thought to myself that I should at least get the book held over night while I looked up granny squares online. The next morning I got online & whipped up my first basic granny square out of some cheap burgandy yarn then in the afternoon went to an appointment in rivers of rain with hail and went to the small library close to me. Although I didn't find the book I had been looking at in the store, I found other crochet books that interested me and brought them home, knowing that I could most likely get Hubert's crochet book out of one of our other libraries. When I returned home despite all the digital information & my new library books, I broke down & took my sweet service dog & I for a walk down to the yarn store to purchase the book while the sun was out, justifying the purchase wih the idea that I can always give the book to a friend or family member for a birthday or holiday when I am done with it. With the digital age not as many items need to bought anymore, no longer do you need shelves of books to read nor do you need stacks of photos in boxes or albums, you don't even need various sizes of tapes for music, movies or videos. So you can these days enjoy much less clutter and yet I am rhoroughly enjoying having this beautifully photographed crochet book in my home.
