Sisters outdoor quilt show

Quilted car

Hugo Cabret quilt

     The tiny high desert town of Sisters, Oregon stages an outdoor quilt show every July.  They close the main street, and volunteer  firefighters hang  quilts from walls and balconies throughout  the town.   Quilt lovers from all over the US and Canada swarm in, oohing and aahing and buying fabric.   Judy and I have longed to go to the show, but even the handicapped parking lot is a distance from the quilts, and Central Oregon can get very hot in summer.  This year the temperatures were due to remain in the 80s, and friends alerted us to a charter bus that would drop us off in the center of town.  So off we went.

My favorite

Fire lookout on Black Butte

    When Judy was a young surgical nurse in her thirties, she spent a lot of time in the Sisters area.   During the bus  ride, while the forests  we were passing through changed from Douglas fir to Ponderosa pine, she told me stories of her adventures.  It was a treat for me to get a few glimpses of Judy's life before we met. Here is one story:   Once Judy climbed Black Butte.  She was almost to the fire lookout at the summit of the mountain when a ranger told her to run.   She  had to race down the mountain just ahead of of a thunderstorm.
    There were over 1300 quilts displayed this year  in Sisters, and we wanted to see them all.   There were old- fashioned quilts and contemporary quilts and an Elvis quilt. There was giant quilted sphere and a quilted minivan.   There was a whole set of pieces inspired by the children's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret.  The coffee shop sponsored quilts from a women's co-operative in the coffee-growing region of Uganda. My favorite of all was a  traditional pieced quilt that hung outside of the Stitchin' Post fabric shop.  My mother would have loved that one.

Judy with equipment and mascot

Detail

    For this 38th annual festival,  the town was well set up to accommodate thousands of tourists, almost all of them middle -aged women.  There were water refill stations, folding chairs set up in every inch of shade, and plenty of bathrooms.  The Lutheran church sponsored a buffet lunch, and enterprising boys bicycled down the center of the street puling a  cooler with  bottled water for sale.  The easy chairs in  the quiet Paulina Springs bookstore provided us a respite when the sun and the crowds got to be too much.

Becky

    Judy brought three tanks of oxygen on the trip, and rolled them around the town on a walker.  A few weeks ago  our friend Roxy made two puppets to keep  Judy company when she is tethered to oxygen.  The puppets went along with us to Sisters.  Sweet Becky sipped iced tea with Judy, and read some picture books, and petted a few dogs.  But it is fierce fighter Bo, named for Queen Boudica the warrior queen, who has become  Judy's constant companion.
     We were quiet on the bus going back to Portland.  There was a woman with a strong Texas accent  sitting two rows ahead of us.  She talked non- stop during the three hour trip to Sisters.  By the time she had talked non-stop for the three hours back, I felt like I knew her life story.  I was no longer annoyed by her, but grateful for the entertainment during the long ride home.

Bo

  
  
  

New car

New car

    One car at a time is my limit.  I don't want to research, shop for, bargain for, finance, register, repair or maintain more than one car at a time.  I held to this boundary  even long ago in my mean- mother phase of life.  When Paul was sixteen and eager for wheels,  I told him to put the wish out to the world.  Sure enough, my mother's neighbor Mrs. Ozur offered to give her old Chevette to Paul instead of to the Salvation Army.  Paul gave it new brakes and made some minor repairs, and reimbursed me sometimes for his insurance premiums.  He made jokes about  his "'Vette" to his friends who were given fancy cars for their birthdays, but he took care of it and drove it safely.    I only  dealt with one car at a time.

It served us well

Signs of age

     In our life today, we have a Prius, which I researched, shopped for, financed, registered, and insured 7 years ago.  We also have a 1996 Mercury Mercoux that we inherited.  It has been time to put the Mercury out of its misery for several years now.
     We thought that a minivan might be useful for getting oxygen into and out of the back seat.   Later on, we might need to transport a scooter or a wheelchair. I brought home the Consumer Reports auto issue, got advice and recommendations from my car- loving son David, and began a mental dithering dance about choosing a replacement for the Mercury.  This went on for about a year.
   Fortunately, Judy has a different approach to acquiring cars than I do.  One Saturday, after a late breakfast at a nearby restaurant, Judy said, "Let's just look at a few vans."  We drove two Toyota Siennas that seemed much too big.  The young saleswoman, who hates selling and really want to be a mechanic in civilian life as she was in the Army, suggested a Prius V. We drove one, and  Judy said, "This would be fine." Nothing about the whole universe of possible cars, nothing about shopping or bargaining, nothing about the dimensions of oxygen concentrator or scooters, just "This would be fine."

Mission accomplished

    The next afternoon, Judy took good neighbor Robert with her for moral support, and they went back to the Toyota dealer.  Four hours later, they came home with our new red Prius V.  It really is fine.
     Nowadays, just as  we have a gaggle of geese stopping traffic when they cross our roads, and a murder of crows cawing in our woods, we have a smug of Priuses in our driveway.
    The first day that Judy drove to the coffee shop in her new car, she came home raving about how wonderful  it is to hear music while driving again. (The radio in the Mercury has been defunct for years.) "How did the oxygen fit?"  I asked.
"I forgot to take it," she said.
A new red car beats oxygen any day.
  

Music makes us happy

Picking and grinning

  It was 98 degrees outside, but that did not stop us from driving out to the country for a picker's party at Sally's house.  Judy played the autoharp along with a roomful of dulcimer players.   Most of them had their sheet music on iPads, allowing them to avoid dealing with  heavy 3-ring binders.  One woman even used a foot pedal that changed the pages on her iPad.  Sally taught the group to play the ukulele.  I sat outside under a  maple tree, singing along with people playing old hymns on  fiddles and guitars and accordions and dulcimers.

Fuey with Blue Hawaiians

 Sally's Ukulele lesson

    Judy and her ukulele group provided background music for a luau to celebrate Ruth's and Ed's 80th birthdays.  They had a grand time rehearsing at our house, and then  sat in the gazebo in Ed's glorious garden, strumming and singing and laughing.  Fuey served drinks dressed in  her authentic muumuu.
    Sharon and I went to the opening of  show by an artist she has bought a large piece from, and from there to.  The artist's wife introduced herself as "Elizabeth the Third."   I tried to ignore the salmon knife she was using as a belt ornament.  The artist expounded on why he calls his show "The Brothel" and made lots of references to Picasso and Zeus and ancient and modern Mayan history.  It was the kind of mental adventure that  I would have loved a few years ago.  That evening, it made me more than tired.  I kept thinking about Laurie Anderson's song "Difficult Listening" and realizing that I was no longer up to Difficult Looking.

Rehearsal

Ed's garden

    From the artist's opening, we went directly to  a musical performance  by my friend Chuck Barnes and his banjo, who promised "mellifluous, and occasionally superfluous, genre-bending banjo interpretations of favorite songs." As we went in,  I was feeling old and set aside from life by gloom .  But as Chuck with his banjo  and the lovely Dr. Lois Leveen with her accordion played through their list of "toe-tappers, heartbreakers, and rabble-rousers," I felt happier and happier.  Chuck is  a native of Newfoundland. By the time he  got to the promised Canadian content, which included Leonard Cohen's Halleluja, I felt joy.

Chuck