My office is a hot mess. I know that there are other areas of the house that need attention, but tonight it was the “family tree” shelf which was piled with books, folders, printouts, notes (letters and notes that my mom took and saved 20 years ago, my notes and documents from my spurts of searching over the years) that caught my attention. I know that I organized it once upon a time, but over the last few years, I’ve pulled information that I failed to refile while at the same time printing new documents that needed to be filed appropriately.

I unloaded the shelf onto the floor of the living room and sat there on the floor with a glass of wine prepared to dig in and fix my mess. My computer and family tree information are on my computer…in the office! It didn’t take me long to realize that I needed to relocate and reassess my plan of attack. At the moment I am tempted to dump the whole pile back on the shelf and find another distraction…I know that I can find one easily.

In the meantime, I found a journal that my dad made during the last days of Granddaddy’s life. Granddaddy was relatively healthy until the end. He kept his mind, but the last few weeks were painful and slow. Grandmother had already lost her mind to Alzheimers. Granddaddy spent his last few weeks in a hospital bed placed in the living room of their home. She thought he was a newborn. Always needed to be touching, tucking or futzing with the “baby”. Granddaddy, when he had enough strength tells her to “sit down! I’m okay.” Dad took note of the general interactions with Granddaddy and he also chronicled a “conversation” with Grandmother…she was talking to herself, in another world. I hope it was a happy one. *sigh* Alzheimers sucks. As does cancer along with many, many other things…such as car accidents!

Granddaddy on his tractor, summer 1999, 91 years old. Off to help a fellow who was stuck in the pasture. I love that smile!

Grandmother, exact year unknown at the moment, with the Starr’s tree. Spring 1990 or 1991 as part of an Earth Day program the kids at Starr’s daycare received “trees”, we brought the sapling to the farm and planted it as a single twig and a few roots. To our surprise, it grew!!

The notebook was a sad read.

Granddaddy passed away August 2002, two days after my dad’s last journal entry. Grandmother passed less than a year later.

I miss them.

…that she is my favorite kid. And since she’s my only kid, I can totally say that out loud!!

She loves to smile and she isn’t afraid to be goofy!

See that ring she is wearing on her left hand? That is the ring I bought her for graduation. We picked it out together. It is a heart, in Sunny’s birthstone. She wears it every day.

Damn it, Sunny, we miss you!!

Originally posted May 2008. I was warm and toasty last night watching Lost while wrapped in the bright blue and green blanket pictured below when my fingers brushed the Project Linus label. I never forget where the blanket came from or why, but I was moved to share this post again. I think it is a really really great project:

Starr and I finished moving home the remainder of her things Friday afternoon. There was much more there than either of us thought. After two car loads of crap, and some goodbyes, we have closed that chapter.

Three days later I am still faced with this:

In two of these pictures, I see two things that are very important to us. In the middle photo, there is a quilt on the banister with stars on it. And in the bottom one, there is a cozy brightly colored blanket with flowers and hearts. Both of these blankets were given to Starr last year after the accident. She received one at the hospital and the other at the high school.

These blankets were Project Linus blankets. Project Linus mission:

Project Linus is comprised of hundreds of local chapters and thousands of volunteers across the United States. Each volunteer and local chapter all work together to help us achieve our mission statement, which states:

• First, it is our mission to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children who are seriously ill, traumatized, or otherwise in need through the gifts of new, handmade blankets and afghans, lovingly created by volunteer “blanketeers.”
• Second, it is our mission to provide a rewarding and fun service opportunity for interested individuals and groups in local communities, for the benefit of children.

Together we have distributed over two million blankets to children in need since our inception in 1995.

The colorful flower blanket happens to have been made by Key Club students at Starr and Sunny’s school and was donated to Project Linus some time before the accident. Key Club is a volunteer organization at the high school that the girls were heavily involved with. It actually means a lot that the Key Club donation came back to Starr in this manner.

Starr and I have made plans to make blankets and donate when we can. The blankets really did make a difference.

I have her heart in my header and always will. I have it in my sidebar. Starr and Skye use it for their non-profit. I hold it in my heart and mind. I think Sunny might be embarrassed, but I know that she would understand why we chose it, why we are attached to it. The history of the heart has been told in the posts that I am copying here:

Sunny’s Heart (January 8, 2008):

I was doing dishes yesterday and looked to my left. I have two cards that Sunny gave me posted there on the side of my refrigerator. I had noticed before that she signed her name with a little heart, but just then I wondered if I could take that heart and make a logo with it.

It still needs work, but this is her signature heart. Starr is planning on starting a charitable foundation in Sunny’s name and memory, and we are thinking that this could be part of the logo.

We miss you dearly….

A Tattoo as Therapy (June 15, 2008):

Well, that’s how I see it. Starr might have a different story.

Starr has been wanting a tattoo for years, she has been talking about it since she was 15 years old or so. She had all kinds of ideas, but for the past year she has been trying to come up with an idea that pays tribute to Sunny.

She considered daisies, an idea that is still on the table, but she wasn’t sure exactly how she wanted them to look. Suddenly, Friday afternoon she came to me and said that she knew what she wanted, and that she was surprised that it hadn’t occurred to her before.

Sunny’s Heart.

The little heart that Sunny signed her name with that I scanned and cleaned up. The heart that is a part of The Glass Dragonfly header at the top of this page. The same heart that Starr and Skye have incorporated into the logo for their charitable foundation.

Below is the last birthday card that Sunny gave me, and the source of the heart. She liked to call me mom, I loved to hear it.

Once she had the idea, she couldn’t wait. She “needed” the tattoo…now. And she got it. The weird part for me was that I wasn’t needed, my permission wasn’t needed…for Starr…or for the tattoo parlor. Don’t they know that this is my “baby”??? That I still want to have control? Yeah, well.

As always…I miss you sweetie!! So very much. I love you!

I just reread last years End of the Year/New Resolution post. Among other things, I said:

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions as a rule. Setting myself up for failure is something that I try to avoid. I believe that life is about learning and growing, fixing, changing, laughing, and loving…all the time. I try to make it a constant effort and avoid tying it to a specific day.

However, this year, today…not tomorrow…I am going to make a more conscious effort to allow myself to breathe, to live, to accept that I can’t fix this. To stop taking on everyone’s pain as my own. I have enough. It serves no purpose, it really doesn’t relieve them of any of their grief or suffering, it only adds to mine.

And to smile more and mean it!

Yes, Sunny is still on my mind each and every day. I miss her. I think about and send love to her family daily as well, as they still and will always carry the loss of their beautiful daughter. There are days that it catches up with me more than others, but I do think that I have moved forward in positive ways.

I do smile and laugh more and I definitely mean it!!

So, for 2010, I plan to continue…learning, growing, living, laughing, being silly, loving and healing. And I want to make more art.

Starr and Sunny, being silly, Summer 2005

mp3: “Raindrops” – Grand Hallway
“Oh the sound of life, oh the sound of love”
“Oh the sound of change, oh the sound of starting”
Buy it here: Promenade
Grand Hallway-MySpace

Grand Hallway – Raindrops (w/ Seattle Rock Orchestra and Perkins School Children’s Choir)

Check out Ann’s VGNO blog hop
–the New Year’s Eve Edition–

Starr and I were reminded of this story the other day. I still don’t have a explanation, but I do know what I saw. Since it has been on my mind for the past few days I thought I would revisit my original post:

Reaching For The Clouds, originally uploaded by Jim-AR.

I saw her standing at the end of the hallway, the end that opens into the living room. It was a couple months after the accident, after Sunny’s tragic passing. I was rushing a bit, doing housework. I don’t remember if there was a reason for the rush, possibly just to be finished with the work.

I took the full bag of garbage from the kitchen and placed it in the garage. Returning to the kitchen, I realized that I had forgotten to grab a new garbage bag for the kitchen can. To the hall, turning right and taking a couple steps towards the living room before I notice that I am headed in the wrong direction. I stop short, and turn around back towards the laundry room where I keep those types of supplies. As I am turning, I look up towards the living room and there is someone standing there, female, mostly in silhouette, but I did see that her clothes were white. She was just standing there facing me, arms at her sides. I wasn’t shocked to see someone there, I didn’t think twice about it; I assumed that it was Starr.

Returning moments later to the kitchen, with garbage bag in hand, I expected to find Starr there, but the room was empty. Odd. Leaving the bag on the counter, I went looking for her. It had taken me less than 15 seconds to retrieve the bag, and I knew that I had glimpsed someone standing there. Starr was the only logical choice, as it is just the two of us who live here. As I start walking into the living room, she noisily comes up the stairs from her basement bedroom…wearing black.

I knew that there hadn’t been enough time for Starr to have gone from standing in the hall dressed in white, to coming up the stairs dressed in black in the time it took me to get a garbage bag and walk into the living room, but I had to ask it out loud anyway. “You weren’t just up here were you?”

“No, Mom. Why?” Well…and I tell her what I saw.

So, was it Sunny? This is my first thought. I don’t know. I do know that I saw someone, something. Beyond that, I just don’t know. Darkness suggested that it could be a vision of Starr’s future, the symbolism of black and white, darkness and light. A message that things will get better, that despite the overwhelming never ending sadness and uncertainty that we are currently experiencing, that there is and will be light in the future.

I haven’t seen her or anything similar since. However, Sunny and I did share a “Pappaw” dream, which I will post soon*.

Sidenote: Daisies were Sunny’s favorite flower. I always imagined that she liked the white ones, but I don’t know for sure. I saw the photo above last summer and was reminded of her.

*I Dreamt of Sunny

JAM’s post today reminded me of this picture of Starr, Skye and Sunny. The girls were at a concert and obviously having a blast! I probably have more pictures with orbs in them, but this one stands out. I am guessing that in this case the orbs are raindrops, but it did and does catch my eye, as do those happy faces.

Starr, Skye and Sunny

Miss you, Sunny!

I won’t elaborate, but Starr amazes me. Her strength and determination in the face of this tragedy. Her ability to see what she needs to do. Her insight.

She had one of those moments last night, but this time she didn’t need to come home and escape. She used her sorority sisters and called me later to talk. It’s good. My job as “safe place” may be fading a bit, but that is the way things should be. Healing, growing, moving forward.

We are lucky, lucky that she survived the accident. Lucky that she has the character to grow from it and honor Sunny at the same time….but it sure isn’t easy.

Always love to Sunny’s family who are never out of our minds. Never.

A hair dryer is a hair dryer. Right? Sometime early in my recent (still) illness, my hair dryer quit on me. I thought I would shower, blow out my hair and try to feel like a human being for the day, but it just blew cold air. Just what I needed.

Starr and I had a spare that I used to blow out her hair with when she was in high school. With her curly hair, twice a week we would sit down in front of a movie and I would methodically straighten her hair. The flat iron didn’t leave her hair shiny and movable like the blow dryer and round brush did, so this was our method of choice.

The spare hair dryer was fairly expensive, but didn’t have much guts. Which was perfect for our blow out sessions,  but not for my thick head of hair. We picked out a gentle dryer on purpose because one day when Starr was in 10th grade, she wasn’t happy about the way her bangs were looking. She was stressed and was using my hair dryer and round brush to try and “fix” them. I was in the living room when I heard the blood curdling scream. I ran. She was hysterical. Not injured, but she no longer HAD bangs! The smell of burnt hair filled the room. Gah. There were tears, lots of tears. You can’t just fix that! We made an emergency trip to the salon to salvage what we could…she was very late to school, it took forever for her hair to grow back the way she wanted, Sunny and Skye started calling her “singey”…poor thing! Anyway, I pulled the spare dryer out of the junk closet and tried to use it, but found that it just wasn’t going to work for me. At all. I spent the next few weeks looking pretty darn feral with my natural hair, too sick to go shopping for a replacement.

Finally, last week, I was able to go shopping. A little overwhelmed at the choices, I was always a “they just blow hot air, right?” kind of girl. Do ions, ceramic, nano-silver and tourmaline really make a difference? Some dryers had one element, others had another, some had none, what worked best? When did it get so complicated? So I picked a dryer that claimed to have all of it: tool science, Nano-Silver Ionic-Ceramic Professional Hair Dryer and just hoped that it blew hot air.

I saved my receipt and tried to carefully unpack the dryer from it’s packaging just in case I needed to return it. Unpacking this dryer without destroying the packaging is apparently a skill that I don’t have. Thankfully it doesn’t matter, because I love this dryer. My hair dries faster and is softer and smoother. Starr could see the difference in my hair right away. Then she tried it on her own hair. It might have been the hair dryer, or just a good hair day, but she received several compliments on her hair that day.

Now she wants one.

Are there better dryers out there? Probably, but I am very happy with this one and felt the need to share.

**This is not a compensated review, I just liked the hair dryer…a lot!

This is one of Starr’s pictures from last Saturday’s 5k, she took it before they set up, before people started arriving to help and check-in. I have picked out some fun ones to share, but thought this one deserved a post of it’s own.

This is a picture of the tree that was planted at the high school in Sunny’s memory. I’ve posted about the tree a couple of times in the past: Spring Blossoms and You Never Know When. I see the tree several times a week and never once pass it without thinking about Sunny, about her family, without feeling pain. I may not say it in every post, but I miss her…all day, every day.

The tree has a plaque at it’s base with Sunny’s name on it. It matches her headstone. It breaks my heart.