Our kids and grandkids share their lives with us on Snapchat.  Every night right before we turn the lights out John and I hover together over one of our phones to watch the chats that have come in that day from Adam & Heidi, Claire & Graham and Aaron & Abbey.  They are all really good at capturing fun moments in their family lives to share with us.

A couple of days ago as we watched the Snaps, I saw a few seconds of Adam and Clark playing ping pong in our Orem home basement.  Their family was in town for a wedding and a funeral (Heidi’s sister Hailey, and her grandfather Moreno).  After the fun ping pong game flashed by, I realized what I was seeing and my heart FELL.

Since the kids have moved out, I’ve used the ping pong table as my quilting work space.  My large cutting mat and tools were on one corner and the entire table was covered in dozens of quilt projects in process–with my neatly organized piles, each intended for a particular quilt.  I also had bins of scraps, sorted by size, shape and color, cut away from projects I worked on.  They were ready to use in applique projects and scrap quilts.

At the far end of the table I had pieces I was auditioning for backs and borders.  Under the table I had 5 or 6 quilt projects cut out and in containers ready to sew, lined up like fat soldiers.  The entire table was covered in a perfectly organized chaos of my work.  In fact, when I went home for those couple of days in May to see my doctors, I went down into the basement and just sat at the table, looking out over all the projects just waiting for me to return.  It made me feel SO HAPPY.

Then I saw the cleared off table as they hit the ping pong ball back and forth.  I was stunned and filled with anger and grief and a profound sense of loss.  Every piece of fabric on that table (1000s of them) had been in a particular place for a particular reason.  But they were gone, and knowing my son, they were not in a state that I would be able to restore.

I did not sleep at all that night.  I tried to reconstruct my piles in my mind, project by project.  I finally had to give up and force myself to be grateful my piles weren’t burned or flooded or completely destroyed.

Before leaving Orem, Adam sent me the video below, as he tried to make things right (after I told him he’d just committed the unpardonable sin in my sewing world).  He wanted to show me how nicely he’d removed my fabric.  Well, you can be the judge.  A few days have passed now, and I’m getting over it.  It will take a lot of work to put everything back as it was, but there will be time for that when I get home.  In the meantime, I just have to put a mental blanket over it and try not to think about the loss.  It could be worse.