What will I sew now?

We are home now and doing the long unpack.

After a difficult week my daughter lost the baby. There is no other way to say it. I feel so sad for her, she tries so hard to be good about everything, but this was tough. But she is too. One of my sisters once said that we are the kind that don't fall apart even when we want to. When we want to.

Do you know what I mean?

I think perhaps only women really understand this.

But you know today was a sunny day and she and the little girls came over and they walked around the back yard making grass and stone soup, like kids have done for generations, and made us laugh. 

You just have to trust.

Yesterday morning we went out, she probably should have been resting, and well we brought her a new summer wardrobe. She had different plans for this summer but you know you just have to regroup and feeling better on the outside is a start. 

I know there is a vanity is all the time we spend thinking about what to wear, I know that, but there really is something about new clothes that helps. Of course they don't actually fix anything but they make a difference. 

Maybe it means if you get up and get dressed you are moving forward. I don't know.

I remember my favourite all time movie scene in "Men don't leave" where the father has died and the mother takes to her bed and the kids are sort of panicking. A family friend who was a nurse I think, Joan Cusack who was wonderful, comes in after the mother has been in bed for days or weeks maybe and the kids are living off cereal or something, and Joan Cusack, picks the mother up out of that bed (Joan Cusack looks pretty strong) and throws the mother who is screaming and swearing at her into a shower, and says enough, you get dressed.

Getting dressed, and dressed up, means something.

I remember too that when my mother, who was an only child, lost both her parents the year she was sixteen, she went to live with an aunt and uncle. She always remembers the summer she was sixteen as the summer all the aunts sewed for her, making her a new wardrobe, and they put a red rinse in her hair too.

She can still tell you what those outfits looked like.

And for me when everyone went home tonight I went into my sewing room and spent a little time refolding some of my fabric thinking what I should sew next.

I really need to sew.