Dave and I unboxed and set up my new sewing machine this morning. It's a Juki TL-2010 quilting and sewing machine. It's what's known as a mechanical, single-stitch sewing machine, meaning that the body and most of the moving parts are metal and there are no electronics onboard that make it possible for it to have a hundred or more different kinds of stitches. It only has one stitch, a straight stitch, and it can make one thousand-five hundred of those stitches in one minute, which makes it faster than any of my other sewing machines by around a thousand stitches per minute.
The place I ordered it from, Juki Junkies, tested the machine and set the thread tension for the type of thread I use the most (50 weight, 100% cotton). Then they shipped it to me. I got it last Friday and it's been sitting in its shipping box since then.
We set it up, then I oiled it (they suggest you oil it when you get it and then frequently thereafter), and sewed a few experimental stitches. Despite it's being a very serious and straightforward machine, it has a few nice features that none of my other machines have, like a knee lift and an automatic thread cutter. I sewed a few crumbs together, just to start getting a feel for it.
It's been cold these past few days. At night it's been down in the single digits and our pond has a good layer of ice but there are still open spots and the water is still flowing so we get a good crowd of birds in the morning coming down to drink and bathe. Sometimes at night, when I'm sleeping or not sleeping on the couch, the motion sensor on the porch light is activated by something. I think it's one of our night creatures, the neighbor's barn cat or a coyote, coming to drink. Thanks to Dave's mother who installed the pond and its little river, we probably have the only full-time water source in the neighborhood.
Speaking of sleeping and not sleeping, I'm not sleeping these days--or when I do, it's for no more than an hour and a half or two hours at a time. Sometimes it's for 20 or 40 minutes at a time. I dream complicated, multi-faceted dreams that vanish as soon as I open my eyes. I don't remember any of them two minutes later. Psyche is shifting things, I think, re-organizing the new reality, life without my brother. I hate this timeline.
When I'm not sleeping, I watch youtube videos or binge Netflix shows or just surf the internet, carefully avoiding the news. Sometimes I get up and sew for awhile, sewing bits of leftover fabric together with no plan. Last night and the night before, I pulled out my journal and wrote a bit, but nothing that's really tapping into what's below the surface. I'd try to read, but my brain still isn't hanging on to information and reading the same sentence over and over isn't very distracting. Once upon a time, I could have gotten drunk or high and passed the time that way, but those days are long gone. A few nights ago, I took hydroxyzine to try to get to sleep and it helped--I slept for two hours or so but then woke up, dazed and dehydrated. Diphenhydramine has the same effect, though with that I only have to take half of a child's dose.
I got dressed yesterday for a time and we left the house.
We met my mother at the funeral home and picked up Rudy's ashes. My mother was wearing a mask, which is unusual for her and it was only when I asked why that she told me that she is sick with a sore throat and what she thinks is a head cold, but she hasn't tested herself for Covid. David and I still wear our masks all the time and we did yesterday, too.
We brought the ashes home and put them on the mantel. They're split between a gray urn and a black "mailer" box. I hope to replace both with a single, larger urn soon. We have a makeshift altar set up with some flowers and candles, photographs, some of his figures and toys, candy. It's unimaginable to me that less than a month ago, I could have dialed his phone number and heard his voice. Or texted him and gotten a reply. It doesn't make any sense to me that those things are things that I can never do again. It hurts. It still hurts and I suspect it will for a long time.
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