I know, I’m a terrible blogger. I will never “maximize my blog traffic” or “build my followers” if I keep posting once every 9.4 months.

Usually, when I”m boring on the outside, it’s very interesting on the inside, which = writing. Lately, though, I’ve just been boring. I have, however, been knitting like a crazy person.

An example of part of it:

(catapult for scale)

That’s my pile for Pine Ridge.

When I was 16, I went to the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux Reservation on a church trip. We stayed for 10 days on Red Shirt Table, where we ripped out the guts of the Episcopal church’s parish hall, rewired it, insulated it, and sheetrocked/painted so they could use the parish hall during winter.

I’ve never worked so hard. Every day, a little old lady would bring up a paper grocery bag of fry bread. Father Two Bulls arranged for drum singers and  a small powwow. They put up a tipi behind the church, and to be inside it at sunset was like being inside the sunset.

Every morning we watched the sun rise over the Badlands.

That trip changed me forever: the land, the work, the poverty, the people – their generosity and their lack of bullshit.

The people of Red Shirt, many of whom were single mothers raising not only their own kids but those of lots of their relatives, lived in uninsulated cinder-block houses. So any damn thing I can knit to help keep them warm, I should.

A few years after I went, my dad did, and he had a similar experience. Words were not his forte, but we shared a language of expressions, sighs, and waved hands, and I know his time on the rez meant as much to him as it did for me.

Today is his birthday, so it’s a good day to pack up that box and send it off. I hope it’s received with half the joy I have in sending it.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes shot:

A certain Mr. Jinx likes to stick his cold wet nose into my business.