Remembering my Oma or what it means to love vintage today

My relatives from Canada came
with all their love and
while with them I finished this scarf
for the middle munchkin who is currently 4 years old.


I learned that my Oma crocheted.
I had forgotten that doilies are crocheted.
Why did I not have an interest in this earlier!?
I never asked my Oma how to do these things and
here I am trying to learn and she is
I pray praying for me with our Lord and Saviour
in the heavens... 

I just finished a bigger yellow square
like this one
for the September School Blanket.

It started with this ball of yarn.
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I knew that I was honouring and remembering my Oma
by learning her craft of knitting.
*
I find myself hungry for stories of how Oma created.
How did she live?
What did she do?
Why did I not ask more?
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I had once written down a lot of stories that she and Opa told us
on one of the last visits they had to Michigan
years ago.
I wrote them down in a blue and white journal.
I remember I wrote it with deep dark blue ink.
That journal has been lost for years now;
perhaps mistakenly thrown away in a
bedroom move when I was in my late teens/early 20s.
*
My Aunt talked about things she had from Oma,
lost now because of the fire that
burnt their house down a few years ago.
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I find myself wanting to know
how to spend my days and everything is new for me
and yet I discover again
how I miss my Oma or
how I am grieving her
or how I am grieving a lost way of life
that so many of us are trying to recover.
*
I forget this somehow;
how grateful I am to have grown up a Christian
and now to belong to a Christian tradition of many centuries past.
I have thought often about how so many are into
crafts now,
rediscovered from our Grandparents time
and how vintage,
what was called retro a decade ago,
is in and how we love it.
I see it where I live.
I see it in the places I walk.
I see it in the churches that have
been here for a century
or more.
*
What I think many sadly do not realize is that
they are not just wanting the fashions of decades back,
or the precarious peace,
or the seemingly more simple times...
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Yes, we are looking for more organic living,
Yes, we are looking for a kinder way to live, more sustainable,
more responsible,
more loving to the earth we walk on.
And yes, we want beauty, we want to create,
we want to go back to good ways of non-disposable things
that are not just used and thrown away.
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We are looking for all this but MORE, so much more.
We are looking for the paths of peace.
We are looking for a way forward.
We are looking for clues, even in snatches, of how to live.
We are looking for ways to raise our families
and have a way of life that will make our children
able to survive the tragedy of life,
to have the wisdom to know how to navigate life
and above all, to have a sense of meaning,
a inward motion and purpose that is
not failing or wavering.
And for this
I remained convinced
we need the Church.
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It is the Lord Christ and the way of life that
He puts forward for us to live in.
It is a path, a way of life
that brings health to the bones,
inward and steady peace
and a clear eye.
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It is this that the crave and love for vintage,
for my Oma and her love of the Lord Christ,
it is for all this that we are searching
far and wide for.
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It is this Christ that we must pray to and seek to
pray to as we raise our children.
As we knit scarves, blankets and socks.
It is Christ's mercy and way of life
that is sought for,
even for those who are yet unknowing of the One
who they so desperately searching for...