sadness and socks

This week has been thrown entirely off-kilter. One minute life is a gas and the whole world is your oyster, and in an instant everything you thought important seems trivial and useless. Sunday morning, in my hometown, a friend of mine was lost in a fatal house fire - along with his girlfriend and a roommate. Mark had been such a gentle, wonderful, ALIVE person; perhaps the most alive a human can be.. and now he's gone. Although I feel so removed from the situation, I was overcome with a feeling of ennui - what is the point of living if we could all die at any given moment? - but I cannot be sad forever. I am now resolved to living life like the fullest, and in a way that I know Mark would be pleased with. It is, perhaps, the very least I can do.

 

Here are the few mementos I have here to remind me of my friend: two polaroids taken when we hung out in Toronto, and a pin he had made for me by John K Sampson of the Weakerthans. Any others items be in a box in Victoria, which I will pull out and appreciate when next I find myself home, surrounded by friends. 

I remember making jack-o-melons on the back porch of the movie theatre where he was living; jumping a fence and wandering through a chinese fairground lit up for an event; drawing hot-air balloons on his wall. I remember the day we bought a vase from VV and walked from Store St into Ross Bay, chatting and singing and collecting flowers from gardens as we went. We stopped at the Ross Bay Cemetery, the oldest on the island, and wandered around until we found a grave in terrible shape. Alice Conner, if I remember correctly. It was overgrown and cracked so we cleaned it up and swept it off and left our flowers there. For Alice.  

I hope one day I can do the same for dear Mark. 

 

To keep myself sane and somewhat busy, I've started on the process of knitting all my leftover sock yarns into a few pairs of crazy socks - although, this first pair is not all that crazy. The cuff is a blue/grey gradient, transitioning into black/white/grey stripes, which may end in more blue/grey and possibly some green if I need to stretch the toe. I have half a drawer filled with odds and ends like these, and I'll be glad to cull it... if only to full it again with more yarn. My goal for the year is to knit up some of my existing yarn, and finish 2 of the three half-pieced quilts in my sewing room. It should keep me busy for a little while!

Stay safe, friends. Remember to treasure every moment.