It’s taken me almost 9 months and one pandemic, but I’ve got Catherine’s fabric, yarn, fleece and various and sundry tools boxed and ready for pickup by volunteers from the G’ma Circle of Charlottetown. They’ll be part of the Fabric and Yarn Sale, in support of the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign (the sale will, touch wood, happen sometime in 2021, pandemic-willing).

Getting to this point has been bracing: Catherine’s collection was vast, collected over decades, and the clearest representation of her and her sensibilities; wading through that has not been without its emotional challenges, and I got here only be rationing the work into small chunks, a little every day.

Grandmothers to Grandmothers is a project that Catherine would have loved, and knowing that her materials and tools will be in the hands of people who will make them into things takes away some of the sting of imagining all the things that went unrealized by her hand.

This is not to suggest that her studio is empty yet: I’m hopeful that Habitat for Humanity will come and pick up the furniture and shelving, which will leave me only with the task of finding an appropriate way of documenting and preserving the archive of work she left in her wake.