and sometimes the Karma is good

It's been the most amazing last few days....I've won a skein of WM yarn in a colorway I suggested and named. Lesley from Ravelry posted an offering to win a skein of Woolmeise yarn by visiting her blogsite and suggesting a colorway you would want in a yarn or roving and giving a name for the colorway. She said she usually named things in her shop after people shhe knew, and suggested it would be nice to know the backstory.

I'd been thinking of my father recently. Dad died in November of 2004, and I still miss him fiercely. Thinking of him made me remember the last time I saw him. My mother had insisted the whole family go to Disney for vacation after school got out that summer. So we did. All of us. My brother and his daughters and their husbands and my other brother and his wife and kids and my crew and my aunt and-- oh, 21 of us all together. We stayed on the property and my sister-in-law ran all the kids through the character breakfasts, lunches, and brunches; we met up in nifty theme restaurants for dinner; we did the Downtown Disney shopping and saw the shows and the fireworks and my husband and I enjoyed a quiet afternoon swimming at the pool while the gang did the waterparks. It was busy, it was fun, it was family.

After a week of all that fun and games, my husband and daughter and I went down to North Forth Myers to spend some time with my father while the boys went home with Grandma.
While we were there, Dad and his wife took us to Sanibel Island for the day. It was so very beautiful. We relaxed and watched the dolphins frolic in the crystal clear aqua blue water, listening to the surf pound the beach. The beach my father liked was a small out of the way one that locals frequented. It was too out of the way for the tourists, so it wasn't a bit crowded. In fact, e had the place almost to ourselves for parts of the day. We drove through the wildlife preserve (where my Dad terrified my step mother by almost hitting another car to avoid hitting a tortoise--She fumed at him and he --only half kiddingly--informed her the bill to repair the other car was a lot less than the fine for hitting the tortoise!). We toured the island, visited the lighthouse, and had lunch at the lighthouse cafe. I fell in love with the island. If I were a bit crazier, I would have retired there immediately and run a B&B.

It's too bad I wasn't a bit more insane. If I had been, I could have spent more time with my father. As things would turn out, that was the last time I saw my father alive. As far as a memory to carry with you, well, that's a pretty good one. Dad learned a few months alter that he had cancer, and he slipped away pretty quickly. I had planned to go see him over the winter holiday break, but he took a turn for the worse before then. The next I knew I was getting a call from my step-mother, telling me I needed to come down right away, and warning me that he would probably be gone before I could get there.

I called my sister and she drove to Indiana from Oklahoma while I franttically made sub plans for my classes and called my brothers who live in town. We asked our brothers if they wanted to go, and they both declined because of work. After my sister rested a bit, we headed out. About 40 miles later, my youngest brother called to say he had gotten off from work after all and wanted to come with us. The three of us drove straight through to Florida, knowing we would be too late, but hoping we would not be.

It was my sister I worried about the most. I'm the oldest. My parents separated when I was about 5 and reunited again breifly when I was about 11, just long enough to have my youngest brother. As a result, I was the ony one who remembered what it was like to have a Daddy that read bedtime stories or took you to his work with him or brought home goodies on payday. I was the only one to remember having his parents as grandparents. The boys had both been to Dad's in the past couple of years, and although their relationship with him was different than mine was, at least they had seen him and had the chance to iron some things out. My sister and Dad had a falling out years before and they hadn't really been close since then. She hadn't seen him in many years. They had talked things over on the telephone, and were building a new relationship, and I hoped she would be there in time to touch his hand one last time. We only missed him by a few hours.

So we stayed to plan a funeral and help my step-mother clear my father's things from the house. The neighbors in the trailer park community loved my father, and we were drowned in food and invitations to dinners and memorial meetings. Everywhere he went, Dad impacted people. They noticed him. He was funny and wry and sweet and mischievous. They would miss him almost as much as I do.

While we were there, my sister remarked that she had never been to the beach. That astounded me. When I was young, we lived in Florida. My great-grandparents retired to Florida and my father lived with them after his mother remarried. He spent as much time with them as he did in Indiana. I'm probably lucky my parents ever met. Since he was close to them, we lived near them when I was young.

Since then, I make sure I get to the beach as often as possible. When I was a teen, I took off on a wild weekend vacation to Florida with some friends one time (and got in terrible trouble with my mother!). When I was a young adult, divorcing my first husband, I moved to Nevada, and fell in love with the rocky beaches along the cold water of Lake Tahoe. When I moved back from Nevada it was to Florida that I moved. On vacations, my husband and I try to manage to route ourselves to some big water somewhere, somehow. I can't remember not going to the beach.

So we took my sister to the beach the day before Dad's funeral. Not just 'a' beach, but the same beach my father had taken me to the last time I was there. Again the beach was not crowded, and only a handful of locals kept us company on the acres of pale sand. Again the waves were musical, the sky almost too blue to be real, the water so clear you could count the ribs on the shells, and the dolphins frolicked. I laid on the beach, listening to my step-mother and my sister talking, my step mother trying to reassure my sister that our father knew she loved him. I watched my brother not talk about things (that's how he manages his emotions). And I let the warm sun bake me, the fresh breeze cool me, and the water lull me.

I thought about all the ways my father was a great father to me and all the cool things he taught me. I remembered how easy is usually was to be his daughter. He probably wasn't half as much a father to the others as he was to me. I was the oldest, his first, and the only one really old enough to remember having a Daddy as a little child. More than that, I was the only one to keep reaching out to him and to always stay in touch. We shared the same skin tones and hair color, the same love of music and the ability to play guitar, an abiding love and respect for the ocean, and a constant desire to travel. I was my father's daughter. It seemed like a good place to dwell on that, and a good place to say my last goodbye.

So, back to the yarn contest ---I posted a link to a painting of the beach there on Sanibel, and I explained why I thought the colors in that painting would make a beautiful yarn. And I told Lesley why it should be named Niles, for my father. Somehow, I got lucky. She had lots of great entries for her contest, so many that she couldn't decide among them. And she put the names of the people with her favorite stories in a hat and drew out mine.

So now, there will be this beautiful yarn in the colors of the ocean and the beach; it will be called Niles, and if you get a chance to buy some of it, know that the colorway is the story of the lasting love between a father and his daughter as much as it's about sand and surf.