Strokes and Affirmations Among the Stitches

I am blessed to have wonderful friends, so when something terrific happens to me and work and it is ignored and I am not acknowledged my friends step in with hugs, laughter and love. You see, over the years while seeking positive reinforcement at work, I have slowly been killed inside with the knowledge that no matter how well I perform or how great a job I have done, I am not among the elite that gets the strokes.

I am not complaining, it is just a fact and a reality check. Take the quilts I made for the dispatchers flooded out in New York state. I recently was the recipient of a letter that was sent to my Chief on my behalf thanking him for all the quilts and prayers & yet only because the woman was kind enough to send me a copy do I realize there is a letter like this in the Chief's office.

I am not going to pretend it doesn't confuse me and hurt me, but I can turn that hurt towards the light of my friends who believe in me and know what a great person I am but most of all, I can take that letter as I have done many others and the pictures of the people with the quilts I have made and I can place it into a binder where I keep the dates, whom received them who is in the pictures and I can pass that onto my family as my legacy of love and my way of giving back to the community and passing it forward.

For it isn't my co-workers when the day is done and I am gone that will remember me or even care a week after I retire, but it is my family, my children and my grandchildren who will show these books and quilts to their children and it will be from this legacy that I will live on and that my quilts will live on and hopefully out of them all there will emerge a new quilter.

That people is what life is about and sometimes the horse has to kick you in the head before you can open your eyes to see around you clearly.