Mothers Day Project-Meet Barbara Heald

I signed up to take part in the Mothers Day Project. For more on this project click here. I don't normally get "involved", but this spoke to me. Very soon after signing up for this, I received a personalized email and a few days later I received Barbara's fabric in the mail. I'm too curious a person to not have followed the trail and found out more about her. I hope her family doesn't mind me sharing the links to her information, and a bit about her. If they do and I'm made aware of it, I'll edit this post to remove the information.

Barbara was 60 years old and on her third tour as a Volunteer in Iraq when she was killed. She died on on January 29,2005 after a rocket hit the building she was working in. The link to the military information is listed here and I won't repeat it all on the blog. That's not why I participated in this project. I was struck by my "have to, need to" urge to participate in this project. I'm not usually a "joiner", but this I had to join. I'm a Navy brat who very much supports the troops, but I don't believe that we should be over there at all. I had no problem stitching out her name and really, it went quickly. What has taken so long has been the posting of the experience. I thought about Barbara regularly, wondering if she had ever spun her own yarn. She was an avid knitter. Would she have used some hand spun if given to her? I wonder what kind of project she'd be working on today if she was still here. She looks much like some of the women at my guild and I wonder what it would have been like to have met her.

I think of her often and she's become part of my life experience. To stitch her name was such a simple small thing to do. To mail it back seems to be the hardest. I've had this done for weeks and every night I think that I'm going to mail it back the next day, but here it sits as a little reminder right in front of my screen. Maybe I'm just not ready to let her go myself. We'll see. Once again, tomorrow I will mail it out so the bag can be completed.

PS.--You're not crazy....I did take me that long to finish this post. I started it two weeks ago and it's been sitting in the draft file until just today, 06/03/07. I guess I wasn't ready to be done. Time to move on though.