Beloved Brother's Encouragement!

I recieved an email from my BB telling me how much he is enjoying reading my blog! I was really chuffed, & my son told me yesterday, that he enjoys it too.

These are photos of a quilt I made for my Beloved Brother.


One is a view of the quilt taken out on the clothesline, which shows the quilting & colours a little better.
The other was taken inside, hanging from the curtains, & perhaps shows the block detail a little better.

When I made it, I wanted to have 'family' in it, with his 3 sons names in the 3 hearts, and his wife is represented by the Hibiscus, as she is of Chinese/Samoan descent. Our mother is there, along with quite a few other personal things, & it was a labour of love creating it. I am the teddy, which is holding a pansy.

We have not always been as close, as there are 4 years between us, & when you are very young, 4 years seems such a lot!
We also had some living apart, as we got older, -I spent a year boarding with friends, & my brother spent a couple of years living with an Aunt & Uncle, where he went to High School. We actually have different sounding accents, & people often dont believe we are brother & sister.

We had grown up living with our grandparents, & our mother had to work to support us. Our father remarried & there never seemed to be enough money for both families.
Our grandfather died when I was 8, so I dont remember him very clearly, & he spent a great deal of time ill, as he was -unkown to us- dying of cancer. Our mother gave us everything she could & we never went without. She said she couldnt have done it without support from her mother, & I am sure that is probably true, but she did work very hard for us. My grandmother was lovely, & very loving. I was always the favourite grandchild I think, & even though I was not the eldest, I was the first she met- cousins born in England were not in NZ till after the war.

When my brother started work as an apprentice Printer, he came back to live with our mother & I, & I think that is when I really got to know him best. BFJ & I used to love going to dances, & BB would often open the door for BFJ when one of us arrived home at a different time, as I usually had the key. He also used to listen with great amusement as we said our goodnights to our various 'suitors'.

We had so much fun in those days, & have a lot of happy memories. My mother worked shift work, & was not always home, so we spent more time laughing & just enjoying our selves, than perhaps other young ones get a chance to do. We were living in a flat, & it had an old gas stove, which the back was rusting out of. My mother used to make some fantastic meals in it, & goodness knows how she did it. We all foolishly smoked in those days, & one day, as we flicked our buts out the window, we started a blazing little fire in the hedge! We had to rush outside with saucepans & buckets to put it out.

Our Mum was good fun mostly, & she was very fond of BFJ, so we all got along very well.
Our Mum had always had a dream to own her own house, & she did buy a house, which my brother bought off her, & now his son has bought it off him, so it is a house full of lovely memories.
BFJ & I used to lie out on a concrete patio, roasting ourselves in the sun- fools, we realise now! BFJ lived further out of the city so she often came to stay at our place, as it was closer to the Dances & our 'social life'.

The 'soundtrack' of our lives at that time, was a lot of Beatles music, & BB & I used to have fun singing Beatles songs as we did the dishes! (His sons cant believe that story, but it is true!) Roy Orbison was very big, and there was a lot of Elvis, though he was never my favourite. BFJ had some Tony Orlando, & that was the days before Tie a Yellow Ribbon! BFJ & I took that music with us when we went on our Great Apple Picking adventure- so it was a lage part of the sountrack of that era of our lives also.

I still find music is a big part of my life, & it can trigger memoroies of all types. Our children love music too, & have great fondness for the 'soundtrack' of their childhoods, which was all the music of the 70's.