Q IS FOR QUESTION

I've always been full of questions. I remember asking so many questions as a child.

I've been an avid reader since I learned how. I loved learning as a child. I remember lying on the floor in front of the bookcase that contained the encyclopedia that we owned as a family back in the fifties. I would spend hours flipping through the pages and reading with my younger sisters lying on the floor beside me. They were full of questions, too, as most children are.

Questions have always been an important part of my internal world. I was such a daydreamer, even accused of being lazy by an uncle who just thought my daydreams were a waste of time. My love of learning and reading created an endless stream of questions that fed my imagination. I could spend hours in that creative space even then.

QUESTION REALITY

By the time I reached my 30s or 40s, I was also considered somewhat of a conspiracy theorist. Asking questions will do that to you, you know. I would ponder just about anything. I had a reputation of being a little bit on the fringe and open to some pretty wild ideas. Many I discarded along the way, and others I just let remain as things to consider.

By the time I was using email regularly and had learned how to put a signature line on my emails, QUESTION REALITY became my first signature line.

WHY ME?

Most humans ask a lot of questions. Just think about how many questions you ask just to get through a single day. Most of our questions are these silent questions we ask ourselves. We wake up and ask, "What day is it?" or "What am I going to eat this morning?" "What am I going to wear to school today?"

Most humans, by the time they have reached adulthood, have wondered, "Why me?" at some point in time. Why was I either given a blessing or suffered a loss? It really doesn?t matter which end of that stick you pick up, does it?

You might ask, "How did I get so lucky?" if you won a jackpot or a new car in some sweepstakes you don?t even remember entering. On the other side of that stick, you might ask, "Why am I cursed to fail at everything?" when your company gets sold and you are facing unemployment. Both questions come down to two simple words - Why me?

A TURNING POINT

In a few days, on July 25th to be exact, it will be one year since a devastating apartment fire consumed everything my family and I owned except the clothes on our backs and anything we had left in our cars. We lost our beloved cat, Phoebe, in the flames, but no one else was injured. I am grateful for that.

I am also grateful for the care and support given by friends, family, and strangers that helped us begin to move forward and rebuild again. People donated furniture, household items, and clothes. A generous friend sent me money to buy a cheap laptop. Thank you, Carl. The months following the fire were filled with uncertainty and many questions. Questions upon questions.

I had just moved everything I owned into the apartment one week prior to the fire, including all the equipment, devices, software ? (too many things to list) ? for my digital marketing agency.

At the age of 65, I was motivated to learn how to build a website to promote my custom art quilts and teach online classes. I completed training and became a Certified Partner for the Builderall platform and began building websites. I worked for a year as part of the marketing and training team for the company, but I didn?t have the time for any quilting!

When I moved back to Virginia from Florida a week before the fire, I envisioned myself having the time, at last, to set up my art studio and begin my first quilt in five years. I had an embroidery/quilt machine that I loved, a serger, plus a HUGE collection of fabric, tools, and supplies that I had collected over 20 years. There?s a saying among quilt enthusiasts - She who dies with the most fabric wins! I was looking forward to diminishing my 22-bin stash of fabric and making quilts.

The morning of the fire, I made a trip to the local JoAnn fabric store to buy a new quilter?s ruler. I had mistakenly left a small box of supplies in Florida that had the tools I needed. I returned from that errand and immediately went to my room to set up the space to cut some fabric. I hadn?t been back long when I thought I smelled some incense burning. I went to the living room to investigate and caught a glimpse of the flicker of flames on the small patio deck of our third-floor apartment. I was alone in the apartment, so I made a dash to the kitchen for some water.

The day was brutally hot and the sun was fierce, and the cushions and furniture on the small deck immediately erupted into massive flames. I grabbed my phone and stepped outside to call 911. Another woman who lived in the building heard my alert to neighbors and helped me sound the alarm. The flames were quickly engulfing our apartment and soon moved on to others in the building. Eight families lived in that building and suffered great losses that day, but only Phoebe lost her life. (RIP sweet kitty.) The fire swept through our apartment first, but when the embers died and the smoke cleared, the building was locked up and off-limits to anyone. We were not even allowed to sort through the ashes for anything that survived.

WHAT NOW?

Losing all the artifacts of my life certainly became a major turning point for me. All the memorabilia of 70+ years of living was gone ? early childhood photos of me, of my children and grandchildren, family heirlooms, and things like all the cards and drawings made for me over the decades. Everything I thought I was moving towards literally went up in smoke, too. The questions kept coming, but I noticed it didn?t take long for the question to shift from "Why me?" to "What now?". Basic survival kicked in and I knew I had to reevaluate.

We found a house to rent at the top of Lewis Mountain overlooking the UVA campus in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was only a 9-month lease since the house was scheduled for a major renovation the following summer. I dubbed the house The Mountain House. The house was actually the guest house of a historic mansion a few feet from our temporary home, and there wasn?t a bad view from anywhere on the property. I spent many hours sitting in the yard overlooking the campus with Thomas Jefferson?s Rotunda directly in my line of sight. I had made several ?Rotunda? quilts a few years back and found myself wondering if I would ever make another quilt.

Although life itself is fragile, as I asked myself the question - what now? - I knew one thing for certain. Amidst all of the uncertainty I was facing, I knew myself to be resilient. In my ?senior years? I had reinvented myself as a digital marketing expert. The question before me was who I was committed to becoming in this current phase of my life.

I have come to think of the nine months I lived in the Mountain House as a gestation period. Much like a parent preparing for the birth of a child, I was preparing for another re-birth of my own identity. Stripped of all the artifacts of my life, I found a sense of freedom. I found myself often thinking of that famous line from a Janis Joplin hit song during my youth - "Freedom?s just another word for nothing left to lose."

IF NOT NOW ? WHEN?

My best friend, Chris, made a trip to visit me in November on my birthday. We have been friends for over 40 years. We met in our twenties while waiting tables at The Old Spaghetti Warehouse in Columbus, Ohio, and if you pour us a glass of wine and get us reminiscing about the ?good old days?, we can tell a few good stories, for sure. My dear friend knew how much I needed to get back to creating and brought me a new Singer sewing machine! It wasn?t like the one I lost in the fire, but once I had a chance to learn this machine, I knew I could make it work. #takewhatyouhaveandmakewhatyouneed

I began deconstructing any of the donated clothing that wouldn?t fit us, and started resourcing any materials I could from other sources. I stopped in a local quilt shop to buy some needles for my new machine, and they donated a huge trash bag full of scraps. I began building my stash and cutting 2-inch squares of any fabric I could get my hands on. I knew I wanted to create one of my special watercolor quilts and these squares would be my palette. I just couldn?t decide what the subject of this design would be. I thought I might do a remake of my FREEDOM quilt, so I just kept deconstructing clothing and cutting little squares. I listened to podcasts and audiobooks while I worked, as I had been my habit for years.

ON CUE WITH Q

It?s been about 18 years since I quit watching mainstream news. When YouTube and long-form podcasts came into existence, I dropped CNN and opted for what I thought was self-directed learning via the internet. I don?t really see it the same today, though. When the Q phenomenon made its way to YouTube several years ago, I noticed. I started following the narrative from several sources. I could clearly see it as a psy-op, and I was fascinated. I caught wind of it in the early days from a Praying Medic video that caught my attention. I?ve been following ever since. The question for me was, what kind of psy-op was it?

Those early days were full of public talk about human trafficking and innuendos that took me back to interviews I heard many years ago about the Franklin scandal and the Cathy O?Brien testimony before Congress. That got me hooked to follow along and see where this was all going.

I had also quit participating in elections over the years. I think the last vote I cast for a presidential election was for Ross Perot. My mother was a Democrat and my father a Republican. I remember many lively debates over the dinner table in the sixties. I considered myself an Independent, or more accurately, an outlier on the fringe. In 2016, I was not yet convinced to vote in the elections, and my distrust of either party was firm, as it remains today.

WHY NOW?

Yet another question!

Cutting fabric and making my quilts is a form of meditation for me. When I had gathered enough scraps to begin the process of creating the background for my watercolor quilt, and listening to my favorite podcasts as I worked, I was inspired to step out of the shadows to make this quilt a Q quilt. I wanted to loosely represent the Air Q gesture referenced by some Anons (Q researchers that are sometimes anonymous). They allege that former President Trump uses his index finger to write a Q in the air, pointing to the audience almost like an exclamation point.

I don?t know if DJT is actually signaling a Q with such a gesture. You will have to see and judge for yourself. I have decided that Q is for questions, so ask some questions of your own.

QUESTION REALITY.

??

And that is the story behind the Air Q quilt. See it HERE: Link to Air Q quilt