With Hurricane Florence in the news, her path of destruction not yet determined, I was faced with a choice: should I stay or should I go?

I don’t live in an area that is expected to sustain life threatening damage, but with the anticipated power outages and the dark, overcast skies that hurricanes bring, I decided that in the interest of finally finishing this crochet project, now might be a good time to visit my mother.

Last May, when my mother and I headed west toward New Mexico to meet relations we had found as a result of an Ancestry DNA test, I wasn’t fully aware of the turn my life was about to take.

Prior to our trip, my mother’s knowledge of New Mexico had been limited to one time she drove through in late August of 1999, when a precipitous move was brought about by an unexpected job offer. Given the limited options in Shasta County when the question “should I stay or should I go” was posed, the decision was easy. We had to go.

My family and I had three weeks to get from where we were in California (a small, unincorporated area known as Bella Vista just east of Redding) to Wilson, North Carolina.

The tight timeline meant that we had to make decisions quickly. The most essential things were packed into two cars and a truck that we were driving across country, things deemed important enough to keep, but not essential to daily living were put into storage, and everything else was sold, given away, or thrown out.

We arrived in Wilson with a couple of hours to spare, and, as it turned out, just weeks before Hurricanes Dennis and Floyd would make landfall wrecking havoc on the place we now called home. Dennis landed on the coast of North Carolina first as a hurricane, then went back out to sea and returned as a tropical storm. The rain, it seemed, would never end.

But it did, and then, just ten days later, Floyd came ashore: a 580-mile-wide category 3 hurricane, dumping still more water on the soggy earth and leaving a path of destruction.

Having lived through that, I know how disruptive the storm and the aftermath can be, and with that in mind, I decided the best course of action was to pack up my dog and go somewhere with good light that I would reasonably expect would be dry, and as it happened, I knew just the place.

When my mother and I set out on our initial westward trek in May, I had wondered how she would like seeing the west again; it turned out she liked it very much.

So much, that when she asked herself the question, should I stay or should I go, she decided that she wanted to make New Mexico her home, and in the intervening months I have been helping with her relocation efforts, and now seemed as good a time as any to check in with her.

So with my dog and my 2018 North Carolina State Fair project in tow, I headed out to see her and enjoy the spectacular light which I was able to put to good use as I finally finished work on the upper right corner of the crochet crazy quilt panel:

Feeling that the sands of time slip through my fingers, I turned and focused on the mid-right edge of the panel. I had previously crocheted a Red Heart Super Saver flamingo triangle to fill in along the edge, but as time has gone on, I liked the triangle less and less. I could not, despite my efforts, get it to play nicely with the Windsor blue it was next to. Something had to give.

I crocheted two more triangles in two more colors, and eventually settled on a purple from the Caron One Pound line which I then tricked out with a single flower:

Then, acutely aware that time is of the essence, I wanted to get a sense of what needed to be done next, and I got this overview:

There are still pieces to be crocheted and embroidery, seams to be joined and adorned, and when rebuilding and clean up in the aftermath of Florence begins, the right answer to the question should I stay or should I go, will once again be, I should go.