I’ve said it before, but I have to say it again. Time is just zooming by. It goes faster now, I think, than it did when I had to spend five days a week working and cram everything else into whatever time I had left.

I can’t believe it’s almost October. Although I actually love the month of October, with its leaves turning colors and the air getting cooler, I dread what comes next. I keep telling myself that I need to change how I celebrate the holidays so I won’t find them such a chore.

Last year, mostly because I was still grieving so deeply from Bruce’s death, the holidays were very different. I did not host either Thanksgiving or Christmas. I didn’t attend my home church at all during the preceding three months and didn’t go to Christmas Eve service there, which was probably the first one I’ve missed in twenty-five years. But, you know what? It was really good for me. I needed the change. I knew being at Christmas Eve service or really even doing things that I had always done would be too painful, because my whole life changed when Bruce died. With Dad, Mom, Darrell and Steve, we knew that their time was limited once they received the diagnoses they did. With Bruce, it was a complete and utter shock. I had only experienced the shock of a sudden death of a loved one once before; when my step-daughter died. That was hard; Bruce’s death was twice as hard. It was a year ago this month and I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can talk about him without immediately starting to cry. I still haven’t been able to put a photograph of him on my wall though. So he lives vividly in my mind.

I finally finished a counted cross-stitch wall hanging I’d started….twenty-eight years ago, when the Great Hunter and I got married. I decided, since it took that long to get it finished (it probably lay buried and untouched in a drawer for twenty of those years), I’d treat myself to professional framing. I took it to a good friend of Bruce’s who owns a frame shop, much the same as Bruce had owned for many years and he did a beautiful job on it.

I also finished a quilt I made for a dear friend who is battling breast cancer. She lives at the opposite side of the state and although we were very good friends for all our years in school, she moved and although we’d see each other at church when she would come to visit her parents, we had never spent any time together. We call ourselves “birthday twins” because, along with her dad, we were all born on the same day. Two years ago, we decided to get together and met in the middle of the state and spent a great afternoon talking and catching up on our lives and families. We decided that day that we would make this an annual thing.

Last year though, since it was our special birthdays, we both had family plans and didn’t get together. This year, I didn’t hear from her until right before our birthday. That’s when she told me she had been diagnosed with breast cancer again and had already had surgery and would soon begin chemotherapy. So I made her this quilt and I hope that when she receives it, it will remind her that many people love and pray for her.

I spent two evenings last week with a friend who was visiting from Texas and we decided to take a stroll through the Ameristar Casino and on Saturday, I was able to go with my son and daughter-in-law to visit my grandson at his college.

So along with my quilt guild meetings and two services at church, I’m bushed and I’m very happy to just be sitting in my chair watching the Chiefs play. Go Chiefs!