Beautiful day and I love a funeral.
It's a good time to sit quietly and remember your friend and all the others that have gone before.
Selfishly I also find it's a good clear out for the tear ducts and a chance to start again with fresh air.
This one was different.
I'd met Julie at a knit group a year or so before I had T. She was everything I wasn't.
Natural fibers, no known hair dye or nail polish. Comfortable. Quiet. Great British holidays and multiple stitches in her knitting.
I was always super excited if I got to sit next to her. Not because she taught me to knit but also because on the quiet she was so interesting and opened pockets of thought and I am so uneducated.
Like going on holiday in Wales, which I haven't done but I think about it.
When I look round at the woolen things I've bought, most of it is knitted by Julie, a pineapple tea cosy, small doughnuts and slices of battenberg.
I attended her tea cosy workshop and I have the most beautiful unfinished tea cosy you could possibly imagine in a dusty grey and speckled pink. One of those 1950's ones that looks scalloped. It's only fear that stops me attempting the pom pom on top.
Can you see that metallic wool that she has used for the fish in the top pic?
I love the draw string. It reminds me of a completely useless bed jacket.
Anyway. During the gathering Julies sister spoke about their relationship and it threw me.
I am an only child how must that now feel for her. How heart breaking.
She talked about their travels as a family and all I could think about was the games that sisters play when they are in the back seat of the car and the endless play time in the sunshine.
I started to think about all my friends and how they are like my sisters and how devastated I would be to loose any of them and then the guilt set in about how little I manage to maintain these relationships when stupid things in life get in the way.
Like chores and the fear or travelling.
Then of course I was thinking about T & P and how every week they spend together they are closer and closer.
Then I was just useless.
I have never cried so much.
Teary now.
It appears that in March (March!), Julie orgnised a trip to Swansea and whilst looking out over the cliff top in her wheelchair she knitted yellow socks for her carer.
The photos of her time in the Martletts show a tiny lady cared for by people who it appears now knit also.
I love the idea that someone else got to sit next to her and learn skills from those beautiful hands.
I didn't really know Julie Pearce apart from that brief time, and that other time when I hilariously yelled at her for working in the wool shop with those awful menopausal women but she has made me think more about my time here and it's time I did more.
Yellow socks is what I think now.
CM
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