40. #43 Pearl Hill Road

This quilted portrait of the house where I grew up was a Christmas gift to my parents the year they moved from their home of more than forty years to a retirement complex of small homes. The wall-hanging was a compendium of the techniques I had practiced over the years. I painted the sky. I used free-motion embroidery on wash-away stabilizers to create the tree foliage and then applied it to the background. I worked with sheer mesh for shadows and windows. A photograph of the stone wall in the foreground was printed directly onto fabric. But there is no curved piecing, and that was a change.

In my mind the piece marks other changes as well, beginnings and endings. Both of my sons had established independent lives--on the west coast, and who knew for how long? Michael's dad had died, and it had been a troubling time. I could see that the natural order of things would require me to turn my attention to family members a little more frequently than I had been doing. My mother-in-law lived in a nearby town, and my parents lived an hour and a half away. My husband had begun to work from our home more frequently, with a full-time, at-home office on the horizon. Right in the next room. Lots of togetherness would be great, but the noise of the classes I taught in the studio might prove a bit distracting.

Even more to the point, though, was that demands on my time from outside the house offered up an ultimatum. I could continue my full schedule of teaching and commissions, add regular visits to family members, and become cranky and tired. Or I could drop some part of what I was doing and stay the even-tempered, mild-mannered Pollyanna I had always been. (Just ask my husband and children! Honest!) I thought long and hard about how life seems to offer up changes every few years. "Flexible" is my middle name (just ask my husband and children! Honest!), and I felt the need to drop something. I loved getting together each week with my students. But as I became more tired from responding to one family crisis or trouble after another, I found myself hoping they wouldn't show up--hardly the ideal way to approach teaching.

By this time I had taught hundreds of students, and during the previous year I had applied for a grant so I could showcase their work in a special quilt show at our library/community center. As it turned out, this was my "swan song" as local instructor, although I hadn't planned it that way. Surveying the quilt show, I was a grateful, satisfied teacher, but I also realized I was becoming ready to let go of that role. Just as my parents had known when to move, now I knew when to move on.