April 25, 2016 - 22:36
This past week at CCW was an overwhelmingly positive experience. I came in not feeling very well phyically: I was coming down with a cold and also had bad cramps, so was having trouble concentrating on anything. Going to my placement, though, actually focused and centered me, and helped me tackle the rest of my day.
I spent most of my day working with Ronnie, who I have worked with a lot in the past. We greeted each other with excitement when we saw one another, and she showed me the progress that she had made on a piece we had worked on together in the past. It was a needlepoint of a heart that was created with green, blue, and black yarn. She maneuvered her wheelchair toward me and we sat down to get back to work on the heart. We spent over an hour carefully working on her needlepoint: I was holding it up so that she could thread the needle in and out, and using my finger to place the needle exactly where she wanted it. Many times, she decided that she wanted to backtrack, asking me if I could take out some of the threads so that she could start over, or even cut them out completely. She was very exact about where she wanted everything, often taking several tries to get back on track to what she wanted. I turned around to talk to a few other artists as we
I got to see her finish the piece, which was a pretty wonderful ending to my sessions at the center. I got to see the piece pretty much from start to finish, and watched Ronnie's careful patience as she worked through it. The piece will end up as part of a series of gifts that she will be giving her bus driver, whom she is close friends with. My last day at CCW didn't end particularly dramatically: it was like any other day. I waved goodbye to the supervisor, Sam*, and handed her a note as I walked out of the building as my parting goodbye - she was on the phone. I guess this was just a reminder that life at the placement isn't actually dramatic, despite the dramatic mood swings that the artists and teachers can have sometimes. It has steady undertones, and that world will continue to flow the way that it always has, whether or not I am there to help it along in the little ways that I can. That's a comforting thought.