When I got on a plane during the Memorial Holiday weekend, I didn’t know my own strength. Anesthesia from surgery plus Oxi had numbed my physical pain, but put my brain into a foggy haze of an alternate reality. I arrived back in Wilson on an August day of full wattage sun with high altitude thunder clouds. The humidity felt sultry on my skin like a long-lost lover. Healed! My brokenness mended!
I was exhausted from a two-day airplane misadventure when my flight from Chicago to RDU was canceled due to weather. To get home I flew the next day to New York and changed planes to arrive at RDU. I experienced an abundance of divine intervention in Chicago through help from strangers.
With my blood sugar low, wholesome food restaurants closed, and the prospect of sitting in the airport all night Gretchen Polzin-Ridley from Grand Blanc, Michigan offered me her banana, which rescued me. Then two American Airlines employees blessed me with a taxi, meal, and hotel vouchers. This enabled me to sleep in a bed instead of staying awake all night in an airport chair.
The talking news heads report about how divided we are as Americans. Well, I witnessed kindness, generosity, and compassion while waiting in line for four hours to rebook my canceled flight out of Chicago. O’Hare is one of the busiest airports in the country, and the majority of the people I encountered were kind. Yes, there was one extremely rude grumpy buns American Airlines employee, and several were overwhelmed by the high number of flight cancellations. But, overall, American Airlines employees were trying to do their best to remedy an unfortunate situation.
So, I’ve been in Wilson for one week so what’s next? Continue to work on lesson plans and the 10-week schedule for the afterschool STEAM Textiles workshops for which I was awarded a grant from the Art Council of Wilson, and the National Endowment for the Arts. If you live in Wilson and have a child or grandchild interested in fashion design, please check out my >>website<< for more information. The after-school program is for middle schoolers and is sponsored by the new YMCA in downtown Wilson.
Completing artwork for a Wilson Active Artist’s group show at the Mims gallery in Rocky Mount which I have to deliver on August 25th. The two Eastern Woodlands indigo-dyed wool blankets that I created on The Okanagan arrived yesterday. I’m submitting “The Traditional Mating Medicine Blanket” for the Mims Show. My plate is full with completing renovations to turn my childhood home into a Fiber Studio, teaching in an after-school program, and creating a new body of work. But, I’m up for the challenge to make every day productive. Between my near-death experience in March, returning home, and spending the first night in my own bed in August, I’m learning my own strength. TGBTG
Fiber Art by Carola 