I’ve been missing Terri a lot lately.  Not just missing her, but grieving her all over again.  I don’t know whether it’s because I’ve been finishing a quilt and miss her input for the finishing touches.  Or whether I look out at the ocean and know that after she donated her body to UCSF they would respectfully cast her ashes onto the sea and that I will always be able to feel her with me when I look out there.  The school year is over, and I wonder is she there now, in the ocean that I love as much as I loved her?  I just don’t know, but every day lately has been a bit of a struggle in that regard.

So today I posted photos of the quilts I made in her presence, and a few I made after she passed away.  We had chosen the fabric together online for one particular quilt.  It was for a baby quilt, and the parents were musicians, so grandma wanted that to be the theme.  We decided that bears playing musical instruments would be a cute touch.  We searched the internet for at least an hour, thinking surely musical bears would not be hard to find.  In fact, it was impossible.

Suddenly we came upon the cutest fabric you ever saw – little cartoon kids playing musical instruments and jammin’ like there was no tomorrow.  Here’s the quilt…So I’ve been wishing I had more of that fabric – it was several years ago now – so I could recreate something similar if I wanted to.  It was long gone on the internet, and believe me, I searched long and hard.

After I posted the photos of the quilts, I found that the grief bubbling under the surface could no longer be contained, and I cried yet again, as I haven’t cried for her in months.  Miss her terribly, yes, but the tears seemed a thing of the past.  Not tonight.  They came in deep sobs.  My mother says “thank God for the gift of tears.”  Yes, thank God.

My eyes were then heavy and fatigued.  It was midnight.  I obsessively started searching for the fabric again, retracing the links I’d visited many times before with no luck, trying different keywords.  I laughed as I said “Ok, Terri, I’ll say a little prayer to St. Anthony” – her tried and true works-every-time approach to finding lost items,  despite my skepticism.

It was time for bed, and I decided one more time to go onto Ebay – musical children fabric yields about 12,000 results and I’m not exaggerating.  Then I tried one more variation of keywords.  And there it was.  I snapped it up just as quickly as Terri and I snapped it up that first night we found it.

Now you may not believe in angels, but if you’ve read these pages at all, you know that I do.

Case in point.   Good night!