Ready or Not, Here's 2020!

As I start a new year, I can't help but look back on last year. My youngest son is still in college, though he will graduate this May and get married in June. But this past Christmas break, he was still at home with us. One of his dress jackets was missing a button so I took it to a local fabric shop to match buttons so I could replace the missing one, or as it turned out, all of them.

I was not prepared for the flood of emotions that washed over me when I stepped into that fabric shop. My mother, whom I lost last August, absolutely loved fabrics. She learned to sew as a teenager, the daughter of a poor farmer. She used to make dresses out of her father's feed sacks which she said came in pretty cotton prints back then (not burlap.) She became quite good at sewing and sewed so many things throughout her life--wedding dresses, for herself and her daughters, clothes for her family when we were in Africa, and beautiful heirloom smocked dresses for her granddaughters which are now being passed on to her great-granddaughters. (I put my sweet mama's story in fiction form in a book a few years ago titled, The Whisper of the Palms.)

I had to walk back to the very back of the store to find the buttons and as I walked past row after row of fabric, especially the laces and lovely dress fabrics, it was all I could do to hold back my tears. I could just see her stopping all along the way to touch and ooh at the lovely things. I felt her loss all over again and it made me pensive and even a bit weepy all that day.

This happened on New Year's Eve and had me thinking even more than usual about the year gone by and the one to come. 2019 was one of the harder years in my life but it had high moments too. As I start 2020, my mom is in heaven and her new body feels better than it has in many years, a loved one who had struggled greatly in the winter and spring of last year is back on his feet, two of my children got engaged, and I have a new grandson. I have much to be thankful for indeed, and reason to be hopeful and excited for the year and decade ahead. I pray the same for you!