My niece Julia arrived a week or so late, and only after I had finished the pattern for this. I’m not sure that was a co-incidence. (Sorry, Lyndsay!) It took me three more months to frame it and give it to them, but it did happen before they went back to Kenya, so: Mission Accomplished!
(Pattern is from subversivecrossstitch.com, of course.)
I remember J.D.
I guess I’m in what I think of as the middle range of the people who knew him: not from his childhood or adolescence or time in school, but several years before he pointed the compass of his life West, to California and the ocean beyond. I don’t remember the first time I became aware of him, nor have I yet been able to summon up the emotional footing to go rooting through old mail and USENET archives to attempt to triangulate just when that might have been. But I definitely know where I was in my life when he became my friend.
