Next element to be embroidered on the Smock of Love is a cape logo. I’ll get started on it this evening.
Your bonus is a close up of the label on a suitcase that went back and forth to South Africa a few times.
My Grandfather’s suitcase
As I wrote this, a new colleague had joined our team at work, in the role that I had applied for and failed to get.
I was still angry about how it had all been handled so very badly, and also, I guess, angry with myself for not having been “good enough” to be offered the job. My friend, J, reassured me that I was collateral damage in a shit situation, and I see that more clearly now. I also now adore my colleague who had joined us a week before, so all has turned out ok I guess.
The contents of that suitcase are still un-read, though I have dipped into it with my brother just to see what it contains – mostly letters to my Gran, from a variety of people, but mostly from her brother, Walter. I love how she had the closest of relationships with her brother, and as an echo down the generations I have a similarly close relationship now with my elder brother.
***
Mostly on this blog I write about trying to care for Mum as she developed dementia, which nearly broke me on a number of occasions. Gentle meditative stitching her old Fisherman’s Smock probably saved me, giving me a focus and forcing me to carve out time when I could let everything go and just concentrate on those tiny stitches.
If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.
I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.
Did you think my wee swallows were finished in that last post? Well no! The one on the left needed a few wee extra stitches on his head… but now they are done and you see them in all their glory!
Tomorrow I will soak off the plastic that I use to keep me on track with the designs so we’ll see what it really looks like. We’ll also see if the embroidery threads are colour fast. Or not. Eek!
I haven’t told you how Mum describes my arrival in her memoirs have I? I was born at home and was 2 weeks late. Mum makes it clear that she was Not Happy that she’d had to feed the nurse who had been staying with us doing nothing while we awaited my arrival. Then the nurse had to go to another job, so off she went pretty much straight after I appeared.
I think I’ve written recently about being late. Yes here, if you’re interested.
I got some good news the other day, which I’m still smiling about. I’ll share it with you soon, but for now all you need know is that it took me entirely by surprise and it makes me see myself in quite a different light.
My main focus at the moment is this year’s #100DaysProject, which is a knitting project that I am designing and knitting day by day. It’s soothing in the way that knitting just is. And it’s also quite fun to see what it looks like – it feels a bit like gardening. When you plant something you know, in theory, what will appear, what will grow. But when it actually happens it feels like such a miracle. The same is true of my knitting project this year – it feels like an absolute miracle that I am creating this thing, that it starts as 8 individual balls of wool, nice wool, but just 8 balls, each containing 105m of delicious Shetland wool. And now it’s A Thing, full of pattern and coziness. And it will be wear-able. Eventually.
Anyway, off I go to do some more knitting. Or designing.
***
Mostly these days on this blog I write about my relationship with Mum as she developed dementia. Gentle meditative stitching her old Fisherman’s Smock probably saved me when I nearly broke, giving me a focus and forcing me to carve out time when I could let everything go and just concentrate on those tiny stitches, instead of her deteriorating brain.
If you want to read more about this, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.
I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.
I was going to see Mum today, but visiting is cancelled at the home this weekend (yes, Covid related), so we spoke on the phone instead, and she was sad not to be having coffee and cake with me and my brothers. I was sad too, to be honest.
But, as James reminded me, I have long history of not seeing Mum on my birthday. On my 10th birthday Mum was in hospital. I think it was for her back, or possibly pleurisy? Anyway, she remained in hospital and I made my own cake. The following day she discharged herself, so she could hand over a petition to a Government Minister on behalf of the A75 Action Group (which campaigned to improve the road, and therefore the communities along it). I was a petulant child, and never let Mum forget how she discharged herself from hospital the day AFTER my birthday. I haven’t forgotten, but I forgave her many years ago.
I miss her today as much as I did when I was 10.
In other news… LOOK AT THE SWALLOWS ON THE WASHING LINE!
I read this little slice of my life from nearly 2 years ago now and I realise how little things change. And how everything is different.
When I was still at school, I remember being miffed that one of my brothers had a summer holiday birthday, and the other a birthday just before Christmas… but me? My birthday was generally usually in that first week back at school. Oh the injustice! The more I think about it, the more I sense that as a child I thought the world was against me.
Being the youngest of three I was ALWAYS trying to catch up – either physically by toddling after my brothers, or in some other skill, like playing the piano (which I quickly realised was not something I would ever catch up on, so I gave up altogether despite still being forced to go to piano lessons).
One of my refrains was “Wait for me, wait for meeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” which I would wail from the back of the pack of Wolffe cubs.
I have an early recollection of then saying to Mum, one day, “Life’s not fair”.
Mum glanced over at this sulky child of hers and concurred, “Yes, Life’s not fair.”. In my memory she also said “get used to it” but perhaps I made that bit up.
These days I shout the loudest when I sense an injustice.
Because as was confirmed to four year old Loïs, “Life’s not fair”
The three Wolffe Cubs dressed as the Three Blind Mice. And our cousin Caroline as the Farmer’s Wife
Having said all that, I have thought for years that it was totally fair of Mum to discharge herself the day after my birthday. It was so entirely Mum, to believe that her world should not revolve around her children, and also to know that we would have other birthdays that she would be there for. But Dumfries and Galloway is a different place because of her campaigns for the A75 to bypass the towns it went through. And if she had not discharged herself that day, to meet the Minister for Transport, who knows? Perhaps it wouldn’t have happened.
This newspaper clipping suggests that it was my 14th birthday, and not my 10th!
The last birthday I had with Mum was in 2019, and actually I’m not sure exactly how we celebrated that year… but we weren’t to know what was coming, so I’m so glad that whatever we did, we enjoyed it for what it was, and not because it would be the last. We seem to have got so conscious of ‘lasts’ in recent years, and I don’t think it has enhanced any situation.
***
Mostly on this blog I write about trying to care for Mum as she developed dementia, which nearly broke me on a number of occasions. Gentle meditative stitching her old Fisherman’s Smock probably saved me, giving me a focus and forcing me to carve out time when I could let everything go and just concentrate on those tiny stitches.
If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.
I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.
Regular readers may remember that I’ve participated in the 100DaysProject for the past few years.
In 2020 I created a large crochet blanket, with #100SquaresOfColour. And Mum drew a painting each day, until Day 83 when she JUST STOPPED. You can see an online exhibition of her Not Quite 100 Days here.
In 2021 I started embroidering meaningful designs on Mum’s old fisherman’s smock with #TakingSmockOfTheSituation. This continues to be a work in progress – I never reached Day 100, but when I do, I will keep going further. There is so much more to embroider, but I will only return to it when my head is in the right space to enjoy it.
In 2022 I again embroidered, this time adapting other people’s designs, with #100DayStitchUp
This year I’m both pushing myself into uncharted territory and falling back on familiar ground. For 100 Days (starting 1 June 2023) I am knitting colourwork with Shetland wool (one of my favourite crafts), but I am making up my own design, which I have never tried before. You can follow along on Instagram via #100DaysPlayingWithColour if you want. I’ll also occasionally post on here. Probably.
The colour palette I’m starting with is inspired by Carrick Shore, which is the place I go to (physically if I can, or in my mind if not) when I need rejuvenating. Carrick is balm to my soul.
Last year I used an image of Carrick Shore with words to create a collage. The poem Everything is going to be all right by Derek Mahon spoke to me at the time, though I know I could hardly say it out loud, without breaking at the line ‘There will be dying, there will be dying,…’. I imagine there will be more days to come when I cannot recite these words without breaking a wee bit.
***
Mostly on this blog I write about trying to care for Mum as she developed dementia, which nearly broke me on a number of occasions. Gentle meditative stitching the Fisherman’s Smock probably saved me, giving me a focus and forcing me to carve out time when I could let everything go and just concentrate on those tiny stitches. I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.
And if you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might imagine.
You were just wondering what 62 freshly laundered hankies would look like, hanging to dry on a whirligig weren’t you?
Well here you are.
This is the ‘mostly white’ collection and it includes some beautifully embroidered hankies, probably first owned by my great grandmother. They are the softest, finest cotton although many are past their prime and will be repurposed – I have a plan!
My plan, involving lavender and embroidery swirled about in my brain for months (and months) as a thing I might be able to do. I was hesitant though. I had forgotten how delicate old hankies can be, the cloth is soft and oh so thin, reminding me of how fragile Mum’s skin had become, how easily it broke if she knocked herself at all.
But, when you have so many hankies, what’s the worst that can happen? You end up with one in the bin because you messed it up? That would hardly be a disaster.
So, in time, I embroidered on a number of hankies, and created bespoke lavender pillows out of them.
On the first, I embroidered the foxgloves that Mum had painted in Summer 2020 as part of the 100 Days Project; and on the reverse I embroidered a beautiful Mary Oliver quote for my friend Juliet. After that first ultra delicate hankie, I chose a more robust one, and stitched simpler designs – for Mum (Alix), for her sister (Jen) and for Fenella’s mother (Brenda).
Mum loved to hold the lavender pillow to her nose, to breathe in the sweet scent of those lavender flowers. Latterly she couldn’t remember what the smell was, but she knew she liked it. I do wish that I had made the wee outer covers more like a pillow case so they could be thrown in the laundry and washed as they do get a bit icky with bits of food dropped on them! But hey ho, we live and learn.
These lavender pillow hankies were a labour of absolute love and delight – quick wee projects that gave a second life to some old well-loved hankies. There’s another hankie project that you’ll read about in the future, filled with even more love.. but you’ll have to wait for that one.
***
I started writing this series of posts here, with Taking Smock of the Situation, an embroidery project I started after I realised Mum might have dementia. There I was, embroidering her old fisherman’s smock with symbols relating to her life; while her memories were slipping away, like me at a party I don’t want to be at.
Before that I blogged about whatever I was cooking and you can find my recipes here.
I visited Mum again this morning. And took her more homemade biscuits. She really does love her biscuits.
I told her (again) that her big sister has moved into a home. Mum seemed to have a flicker of understanding and then told me (again) that she didn’t think she would do that.
Mum had her 90th birthday earlier this year. We were still in lockdown and my brother was with her. No-one else, as we weren’t allowed more people from different households indoors at home. It really was not the greatest way to celebrate all those years. Three weeks later she was diagnosed with mixed dementia. I was surprised and yet not at all surprised by the diagnosis… I pretty much knew she had the early stages of dementia so it was a relief to have it confirmed. But the assessment was done over the phone and as I sat next to mum listening to the call, I felt she was doing so well and worried there might be no diagnosis. But at the end of the call the Dr told mum his diagnosis. The phone was passed to me and he confirmed to me mixed dementia: Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia.
I hadn’t expected this immediate diagnosis, but knew that I was not now going back to my ‘office’ and working straight away. Instead I reassured mum that dementia was just a word, she was still my same mum and I loved her and would keep her safe.
The next morning mum acknowledged she had a touch of the alzheimer’s.. and then seemed to forget about it. Occasionally now I remind her. But mostly I remind her that she is loved, that she is the best mum.
Your bonus today is the River Fleet, and this view feels as familiar to me as the back of my hand so I’m grateful I get to walk across the bridge and see the peaty brown water each time I go to visit mum.
I took a picture of Mum as she was sitting quietly in the sunshine the day before she was diagnosed. Two days after her diagnosis, she was again sitting in the sunshine, and I took another picture of her. These two pictures feel so different to me. In the first she seems carefree, and in the second, there is such a sadness in her far away look. She looks so lost.
And she was, she was beginning to be lost. To everyone, even herself.
***
I started writing this series of posts here, with Taking Smock of the Situation, an embroidery project I started after I realised Mum might have dementia. There I was, embroidering her old fisherman’s smock with symbols relating to her life; while her memories were slipping away, like me at a party I don’t want to be at.
Before that I blogged about whatever I was cooking and you can find my recipes here.
Same with Mum really. An optician came to the home on Friday and I accompanied Mum to her appointment.
It was just a week since I’d seen her.. and when the carer told her I was there she didn’t think they were telling her the truth (this is a recurring theme). When she saw me she kept asking if really I was Loïs, she didn’t believe it was really me. This was not expressed with any joy, just sorrow that perhaps it was all a con.
The appointment with the optician was hard for me – mum was distressed and tearful and wouldn’t let go of my hands. But shortly afterwards she had forgotten it all. She was still mistrusting and unhappy but pleased that I would come back the next day with biscuits.
I did. And she was much less distraught… I sat and crocheted as we chatted. I’ll drop in and see her this morning before heading back up the road.. I don’t know if she gets much lasting comfort from my visits (other than the full biscuit tin) but I sense she gets some little comfort while I am there.
As I re-read this post I feel that ‘slow progress’ is one of the recurring themes of the last two and a half years.
In ‘Today’ Mary Oliver writes this line:
I hardly move though really I am travelling a terrific distance
And although none of us has moved much in the last two and a half years, we have all travelled such great distances. And this last month Mum has moved less than ever, mostly sleeping, occasionally waking and smiling. But she is surely travelling a terrific distance, and soon will travel to a place unknown. Her slow pace has helped us to adjust to this new destination. She travels with such grace.
***
I started writing this series of posts here, with Taking Smock of the Situation, an embroidery project I started after I realised Mum might have dementia. There I was, embroidering her old fisherman’s smock with symbols relating to her life; while her memories were slipping away, like me at a party I don’t want to be at.
Before that I blogged about whatever I was cooking and you can find my recipes here.
More clothes pegs on a line. They maybe don’t look much like clothes pegs but they are, and I kinda like them. They might make more sense once the swallows are there too.
The bonus picture today is of the Duncan siblings, taken on the steps of Newlands during WW2. They all feature in Mum’s memoirs in different ways, but the biggest character is Newlands itself.. it was given to Norwegians during the war, to use as a hospital, while Gran lived in the Garden Cottage with her daughters, Jen and Mum. But more on that another day.
The Duncan siblings: Arthur, Loïs (my Grandmother), Walter, Lorna and JohnNewlands as a hospital, during the war
Mum was proud of her connections to Norway, first developed on her long journey back to Scotland at the start of WW11. On the ship were only a few passengers, and it seems that they were mostly Norwegian whalers, heading back to Europe to fight. Our Grandmother had a particular and long-lasting friendship with one, Kris Thoresen also known as Big Dog.
And Mum remembered with great fondness the young recuperating Norwegian soldiers who climbed trees with her on the Newlands Estate during the war. When she jumped into a large water tank and cut her foot (almost in half by all accounts!) on a broken jam jar at the bottom of the tank, she was carried up to the Big House which the Norwegians had turned into a hospital during the War, and there the kind Norwegian surgeons sewed her foot back together and the nurses bandaged it up.
In 2017 Mum contributed to a local project, gathering information about the connections between Dumfries and Norway from WW11 and beyond. The project is now all compiled here: Our Norwegian Story. There is oodles of information on the site about the many and varied ways that the Norwegians and the Doonhamers engaged with one another, including a section on Newlands (click through on the locations, and then on Newlands).
There were Royal visits to Newlands, by King Haakon in the 1940s and then King Olav in the 60s. As Mum’s mind started unravelling she became slightly obsessed with King Haakon, and with the plaque he unveiled at Newlands – she would suggest that we went for a visit to see the plaque, because no-one else would know about it any more, only her. There were days I would visit and she would tell me that he was coming to tea the next day, or that he had been there earlier, and now had thrown all his rubbish into that pile ‘there’ (pointing at the corner of the bed, where she regularly claimed there was a rubbish dump).
One of Mum’s other obsessions (for a while) was biscuits. She LOVED to have biscuits in her tin. And as fast as I could bake, and fill up that tin, they would all be eaten again.
And then I found a recipe for King Haakon biscuits! The joy! Of course I made a batch and took them to Mum, who declared that they had probably been made specially by the cook at Newlands, and that cook got the recipe from the King. I took that as praise indeed for my biscuits.
The biscuit recipe actually came from the WI Biscuit book, which is an absolute must for anyone who vaguely likes making biscuits.
And now I have a batch of the biscuit dough in the fridge, ready to be cut into slices and baked, so soon the kitchen will smell deliciously of sweet baking.
Do let me know if you make King Haakon biscuits. Or if you want the recipe for the Cardamom Cookies, which are sensationally good. One of these days I’ll get back to writing up more recipes again.
***
I started writing this series of posts here, with Taking Smock of the Situation, an embroidery project I started after I realised Mum might have dementia. There I was, embroidering her old fisherman’s smock with symbols relating to her life; while her memories were slipping away, like me at a party I don’t want to be at.
Before that I blogged about whatever I was cooking and you can find my recipes here.
Remember what it was like back in the early summer of 2020.
We were all locked down. People who lived on their own were mostly entirely on their own.
We live 100 miles away from Mum and we didn’t see her from one month to the next, except on a few occasions when she had a hospital appointment, and we drove down and picked her up, took her to hospital, and then dropped her off back home again, before driving back up the empty road to our own home. They were long and stressful days, but they included the joy of seeing Mum, even if it was for a short time.
On one of these occasions I talked to Mum about the 100 Days Project, and she was keen to take part. So she did, each day picking a thing in her world (generally her outside world, as she was uncomfortable at people seeing what she had in the house) and painting it.
In other times, there would be an exhibition of participants’ work some months after the 100 days was over, but not 2020. Or 2021, when I responded to Mum’s diagnosis of dementia by embroidering her Fisherman’s Smock.
But the exhibition of 2022 work is on at Edinburgh College of Art now, and alongside, they have created online galleries to showcase work from 2020 and 2021. I have never been more proud, than seeing Mum’s final paintings in this online gallery.
Please take a look; this series of paintings feels like the most perfect love letter to Mum’s garden, in the final year when she was able to enjoy it.
On 2 August 2021 I uploaded to my Insta twice in one day, to make up for the lack of posting in previous weeks. Here is what I wrote later that day:
An evening stitching on the terrace in the sunshine is definitely what I needed today. Each day I feel as though I’m sucking more oxygen of life back into my lungs again. I look up and see the world continues to turn as it always does.
Meanwhile, on the phone this evening Mum tells me something that’s annoyed her about her brother, Simon. He’s pretending to have been an engineer evidently. And then he comes and sits there on the edge of her bed after he got all that money from the co-op.
Mum has no brothers. I suspect Simon is another resident in the home, but possibly not. Possibly someone from years ago. Possibly an amalgam of real people and things she’s heard on the radio, or overheard in a conversation. Possibly all imagined. It matters not. Mum knows she can tell him to leave if she doesn’t want him in her room.
The leaves and the bud haven’t turned out how I wanted them to, or how I imagined them. I could rip them out and keep re-doing them till I got them ‘right’. But why? This project was never going to be about getting it right was it? We’re all just learning as we go, aren’t we?
Mum says much less these days.
Last time I visited her I was wrapped up in a big hand-knitted shawl, and was knitting another scarf, so I was all wrapped up as I sat with her. I told her that James and I are going to Ireland for a weekend soon, to see her big sister, Jennifer. Mum looked up at me, and slowly, so slowly, formed a response to this news. She said, “So many layers”.
Maybe she was commenting on my various shawls, maybe she was reflecting on family life.
So many layers.
***
Before you go, you should know that there are a number of tasty recipes on this blog too… this evening I’m intending on making the tasty Spicy Turmeric Chicken, which is oh so easy and will be a lovely worknight supper. But have a browse at the recipes, see if there’s anything you fancy making.
This series of posts starts here, with Taking Smock of the Situation, an embroidery project I started after I realised Mum might have dementia. There I was, embroidering her old fisherman’s smock with symbols relating to her life; meanwhile her memories were slipping away, like me at a party I don’t want to be at.
Shewolfinthevalley 