This year is dead-set on driving home the lesson, how to let go. Today is the 300th day of the 2025.
You exclaim, “Where did the year go?”
I’m mumbling, “Sixty-five more days of this lesson?”
Flying By
Even though, since 2020, I’ve been more intentional about how I pass the hours of each day and more mindful of how I show up in my world, those first 300 days of 2025 were sometimes brutal. Sure, they sped by in a lightning blur like all the days of all those other years, but this lesson…
You would think this repeated lesson of letting go of one day, then the next, then the next for all the days of our lives would make it easier to release other things. But, like for most, for me, the fleeting minutes into hours into days is a reminder that I fiercely hold to some things.
Letting go came up last Saturday, the 298th day of the year, when I held sacred space for writing with others. The last prompt we responded to was titled “When I Try to Hold It All Together.”
These are the words the emerged for me. They are part essay and part story. They are non-fiction and fiction. But mostly, they are true.
A Sweater Goodbye
It was her favorite sweater. It was not a pretty sweater, but it had history.
My grandmother wore it around the house during cooler months. When her Alzheimer’s kicked in, a couple of buttons fell off, and she began wearing the sweater during all the seasons.
She applied safety pins where the buttons once held the sweater together. She spent many of her waking hours fussing with the pins and holding the sweater closed, yet left and right were never successfully realigned.
What time she didn’t fuss over the pins and closing her sweater, she looked for and asked after my grandfather: “Where’s Norman?”
She’d shuffle from room to room to find him. He never had a moment’s rest after Alzheimer’s and safety pins took over her world.
I’m not sure how I ended up with the gray sweater, or which, if any, of her other clothes were passed on to grandchildren.
I dug through her jar of buttons and found some not-same but complementary buttons. The safety pins? I attached them to an inside seam.
I kept the sweater on my office chair and pulled it on whenever I felt a chill.
Even though I laundered the sweater several times, it still smelled of her, their old house, the days of my youth.
I didn’t notice it in time. The unraveling. Before she died, the sleeve had detached from the bodice, but the sleeve wasn’t an urgent problem, not as urgent as the piece of yarn that unknit itself and dangled from the back of my chair.
Meaux, our cat, noticed it first. I was away most of that day. When I returned, it was done. Undone. Most of the right side of the sweater had become an unraveled pile behind my chair.
I cried.
Letting Go
I had let go of my grandmother and of so many other people years ago. But this last bit of my youth, this last shred of family lore, wrenched my heart a little harder.
I didn’t throw the defeated sweater away at first. What if it could be fixed?
“Mom!” my kids exclaimed. “You can’t fix this.”
Callous, cold-hearted kids, I stewed.
But they weren’t wrong. After their last visit, I promised I’d let it go.
Before I kept my promise, I stuffed my face into the bag of unraveling and buttons and pins and drew in one last sniff of my grandmother and my youth. It was hard, but it was time.
When I Try to Hold It All Together
Can you remember a time when you tried to hold it all together? Did you? Or did it all come unraveled instead? The theme of last Saturday’s InkWell WordShop revolved around control and releasing control. Sometimes letting go is terrifying. And sometimes, when we have trouble letting go, the universe (or a curious cat) takes care of it for us.
Writing about moments like these helps me make peace with them.
Come write with me, with us!, this November. Every weekday of November, AWA will hold sacred writing space in four different time slots. The event is called WriteOn!
Come write and see where the writing takes you. Maybe the words will help you hold on gently and let go gracefully, in life and on the page.
©Pennie Nichols. All Rights Reserved. 2025
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