Weekly update: a cold Easter, memories, a finish!, and good reading

 

In fourth grade we had a unit of "weather legends."  One that I remember is, "If it rains on Easter Sunday it will rain for the next seven Sundays."   I recall the saying each year but I have never tracked the precipitation between Easter and what I now know is Pentecost.  This year, about the latest Easter can get, it's sunny but darned cold!  

Left: the paschal moon on Friday evening as I left the tenebrae service at church.

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My mother died April 16, 2002 -- twenty  years ago yesterday.  I miss her still. I spent a half hour going through photos. One scrapbook leads to another. Friends, flowers, family, books, travels. (And you never forget your mother's handwriting, do you?)

These notes were in the back of a photo album. I take copious notes during our trips, too -- an inherited trait?

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In the studio: a fast finish! I have a box of 3.5" nine patches from the long-time Block Swappers group. I had a ziploc bag with 3.5" HSTs. I've made this design before. The most tedious part is pinning all the diagonal rows together.

The back is a 58" wide cotton print. Or cotton mis-print -- there was a smear where the printing plate didn't strike cleanly. You can't tell because I sliced through it and added the insert strip.

I used my machine's serpentine stitch with the walking foot to quilt it.

54 x 60, approx.

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I read some good books this week!

Nine people across the country get envelopes in the mail. The contents are the same: a list of nine names, theirs included. None of these people knows any of the others. There is no indication of what it means to be on the list. But because one of them is an FBI agent an investigation gets underway immediately and when the murders begin the mystery deepens.

The similarities to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and The A B C Murders is not lost on the reader. Peter Swanson adds other literary references, too, in this fast-paced and very suspenseful story.

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Wheeler Catlett is the fulcrum of these six short stories set in rural Port William Kentucky. Each is a snapshot: click! 1930 when the young attorney goes to town to retrieve Uncle Peach from his latest bender. Click! 1947, when son Andy goes to work on the farm. Click! 1933: Wheeler guides a complicated real estate transaction. Click! 1965, twice: Mat Feltner reflects on his place in the universe. Click! 1967 now Wheeler looks back on his life and career as farmer and lawyer.

Wendell Berry documents the interconnected lives of families across decades and generations. As Burley Coulter tells Wheeler, "The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everyhing. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but who knows it and who don't. What has been, not what ought to have been, is what I have to claim."

I've owned this 1986 collection of short stories for more than 20 years but only now have I taken it off the shelf to read -- no, to savor every precisely-placed word.
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"On the spectrum." "Neurodivergent." Those may be the technical terms to describe 25-year-old Molly Gray, but she doesn't label herself that way. Instead she tells us in precise detail (because that's how her mind works) about her life with her late Gran and her job as a maid at the upscale Regency Grand Hotel. It's hard for her to detect subtle social cues or irony. When the wealthy Mr. Black, a regular guest at the hotel, is found dead in his room she is framed for murder. Fortunately (thank you, Gran) she has a friend with resources and, eventually all turns out well.

P.S.  Don't forget to tip the maid!

It's 5:15 p.m. and the lamb is ready to come out of the oven.  I hope you've had a celebratory Easter, too. 

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