I love to buy planners.
I make each purchase with the best of intentions, but I seldom use them as designed.
The first few days, I am earnest in my efforts, cataloging each activity and writing down the times along with detailed notes, but in short order I return to my usual ways of remembering things: scraps of paper thrown into my purse that I must sift through to get to the other stuff, or as with deadlines, the weight of the psychic burden helps to keep my nose to the grindstone.
Calendars, planners, and all manner of devices for organizing give us the comforting sense that we are in charge and have control of things.
My day today was the kind of day planners were created for. I had many things to attend to and several hours of errands that could not be put off. Worried that I would not achieve escape velocity from the obligations that bedeviled me, I did I finally get to sit down and work on my crochet.
The project du jour was something that I could finish: a bag I started ten days ago and that was inspired by Lu Lingzi, one of the Boston Marathon bombing victims.
I started by securing this strap:
to the body of the bag.
I did this by slipping each end of the strap through openings on either side of the the mouth of the bag, folding the ends and working slip stitches along the outer edge of either side of the strap to both join the ends and lessen the amount of give that the strap would have.
With the strap attended to, I took these three crocheted balls:
and carefully sewed them to one side of the purse.
Here is how the purse looked with all of the parts assembled and joined:
While I had more balls that I could add, I decided to stop with three, one for each of the people who died as a result of the Boston Marathon bombing.
In addition to the three people who lost their lives, there were many more victims whose lives were interrupted — any plans they might have written in their planners upended — and when I use this bag, I will remember each one of them and wish them well on the journey ahead.
