Lots of Sunshine

All this sunshine is a wonderful thing.  I wake up every day and feel happy.  And I'm not a morning person.  Ask my Significant Other...

The only drawback is that the the rising sun streams straight through the bedroom window, and directly into my eyeballs, at 6am.  And my bedroom is white.  And the curtains are white.  And as much as I am a total sunshine supporter, full beams of the stuff bouncing off the white walls and curtains, straight into your eyeballs, first thing at the crack of dawn, is, well, a bit much.

So I hit on the idea of making a pretty blind, to sit in the window recess behind the curtains.  Just to take the edge off those gorgeous rays.

With a bit of creative thinking, I decided to adapt a quilt table cloth made by my aunt.  My aunt lovingly cut the squares from little dresses and blouses that my sister, cousin and I wore when we were little girls in the seventies.  Pretty much every square tells a story from my childhood. The dress I used to spin in when I was five years old.  The dress, with little people on penny farthings, I wore to the zoo with my dad's sunglasses.  I thought I was so cool.  Lots of happy times.

 I was given this table cloth by my cousin after my aunt died and it has sat safely in my dresser ever since. Mainly because at some point after making it my aunt cut out two random squares from near the middle of the quilt, and as a result it had a big ole hole in it!

My aunt was a wonderful woman.  Kind, generous, loving, resilient.  She had a very painful, progressive illness, but she never became absorbed or dominated by it.  She was outward thinking right till the very end.  And she made me laugh like a drain.  When my aunt was admitted to hospital for the final time, I was taking a creative writing class.  I would visit her in the ward, and take the things I had written to read to her.  No matter how much pain she was in, or how miserable her day had been, she always wanted to hear what I had written.  And I would sit by her bed and read to her.  Sometimes, one or two of my short stories would have some choice language in them.  I would tell her about that before going ahead and reading.  I didn't want her to be offended.  But she would just say to me, "Is it integral to the plot?"  "Yes."  " Go right ahead."

And I would sit and quietly read to her, while she sat smiling and listening.  I'm glad that we were able to spend that time together.

With some nifty alterations, the holes have been removed from the quilt my aunt made, ties have been sewn, and my blind has been hung.

The sunshine streams through my new blind each morning.  Reflecting the colours of different materials that remind me of happy times.  And I remember my aunt and how much she loved me.

What a lovely way to wake up.

And my eyeballs no longer hurt.