In late May I wrote a blog post titled, “Another kind of knot to untangle.” In it, I detailed an adventure that my mother an I were on. A road trip — one that spanned both time and space — taking us back (metaphorically) several decades while leading us west to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

A few days after leaving North Carolina, we arrived in “The Land of Enchantment” and set ourselves up at a kind of base camp in Las Cruces, New Mexico, venturing out during the day to higher elevations and returning at night so my mother’s body could acclimate to the change in altitude.

After several days, my mother felt ready to make the ascent to 5300 feet, and we left Las Cruces and headed north to Albuquerque

Our purpose had been to meet my mother’s great grand nephew (my first cousin twice removed). His grandmother and grandfather, had, at his request, spearheaded a search for his mother’s biological family (she had been adopted shortly after her birth), and what they found was me and my mom.

Then this past Friday, we met my young cousin’s mother, and this meeting is why I was in hurry to get the crochet market bag done. I really wanted to have something with a bit of myself in it to give to her when we met.

So after finishing Thursday’s blog post I stayed up late then got up early, and, as a result, I did have a finished bag to give to her as a kind of “glad to meet you” gift:

It was a wonderful and moving lunch. I had been so busy working on the bag, I had not prepared myself for all of the emotions I would feel, but my cousin’s mother doesn’t believe adoption stops at one child, and she has fully embraced my mother and me just as she did her daughter.

With the bag done and the relations and new family met, in terms of my crochet I was ready to continue on my journey to a thousand squares. The number of completely finished crochet squares was modest (one — second row, far right), but my overall progress also included eleven squares with two of four additional rounds crocheted:

along with these five additional crochet squares with three of four rounds of crocheted:

As for the nook in the wall, I added two more crochet squares:

bringing the total completed on the journey to one thousand to 258.

Like my travels to Albuquerque, I don’t know exactly what I will find at the end of the journey to one thousand squares, but no doubt I will learn something about myself and the world around me that I didn’t know before.