Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

Stuff gets done here

recent posts

  • A musical pact with a 96-year-old

    My mother and I confessed our shameful secret to each other on New Year’s day. Irene told me she had stopped practicing the piano and I said I couldn’t remember when I last picked up my guitar. We commiserated on our failure to be our best selves, and then agreed that we’d help each other by promising to report via email every day that we had done at least a little practicing, even just 10 minutes.

    And this is what I adore about my mother. That at 96, and wheelchair-aided and living in a nursing home in southern Alberta, she’s still got game. I took this picture of her when I visited in November 2020 — height of covid, no vaccines available. I had to quarantine in Canada for two weeks before I could see her and let me just say that she was worth it. We had so much fun. On the last day of my visit it had been snowing, and when I arrived at the nursing home for a last goodbye Irene was busy putting on coat and hat and gloves.

    “What are you doing?” I asked

    “I’m going outside. It’s snowing!” she said with that gleam in her eye that always brightens a room. I would say she wears her soul on her sleeve, not just her heart.

    So. We didn’t say anything about resolutions for the new year. We just agreed we’d be a practicing support system for each other. We are a week in, and we are good.

  • Everybody needs an editor

    I wrote a farewell piece to a chef and a restaurant that closed at the end of the year. The place is just a few blocks from where I live. Craig and I probably ate there once a week over the last five years. Cozy ambiance, friendly staff, amazingly delicious food: It was hard to say goodbye.

    Eugene’s scrappy weekly (slogan: We’ve got issues) published the piece, and it got a fine edit from Camilla Mortensen.

    Lessons:

    1. Everybody needs an editor.
    2. I am longwinded at the beginning, essentially clearing my throat with way more wordage than actually needed.

    My writing group can also be good for this reminder. At our last meeting, the first 600 or so words of a short story I’m working on did not pass muster. But the writing group can be ignored. (What the heck do these veteran and well-published writers know?) The editor of an actual publication cannot be. I confess I mentally harrumphed at Camilla’s notes, but once I made the changes I agreed with her. So, um, on that short story…back to the drawing board.

    Being edited also reminds me of the overlap between beginner’s mind, where we are at play, and expert’s mind, where we employ the skills we’ve honed while at play.

    Photo above by writer/editor/photographer/friend Bob Keefer. (If you don’t know Bob’s work, do yourself a favor and check out his web site.)

  • Let the basting begin

    I cannot pass a fabric store, especially one of the touristy kind where they lure you in with gorgeous stuff in the window and half an hour later you walk out with $100 worth of product that you tell yourself you will sew into a quilt even though you haven’t been involved in quilting since you were in high school.

    OK. That was last June in Ashland Oregon at Sew Creative. Now here we are in January and I am resolved to start quilting. It’s a single fabric quilt, not something I have to piece together so I can jump right into layering the front and back with the cotton batting middle. Lacking a quilting frame, this is not the easiest task but I found a wonderful quilter, Sharon Schamber whose video tutorial walks you through a clear way to combine the layers and baste them in place. I say “clear,” but do not for a minute think “easy.” It involves wrapping the two pieces of fabric around flat straight 3-inch boards to reduce wrinkling. You slip the cotton between them and then baste in manageable sections.

    The good news is that I have a large enough dining room table to lay this queen-sized quilt project out on (wrapped around the boards). The other good news (in the lemonade-out-of-lemons category) is that since the pandemic continues with us, I won’t mind commandeering the dining room table for a while. The first photo shows the fabric wrapped on the boards and the first section rolled out for basting. The next photo shows that first section basted.

    The basting will hold the three layers together so that I can hand quilt using a hoop. In my project completion fantasy it will be gorgeous. I’m blogging my progress so that I will have a hope of actually making progress.