Locked doors and Stonehenge

Traveling and teaching can be quite an adventure. And adventure while traveling and teaching is never what I look for or appreciate at the time.

In September of 1990 while I was living in Denver, I was invited down to Sandia Mountains to teach. I had the good luck to stay with Barbara Scott and her husband, John, in their new and beautiful house in the southeast quadrant of Albuquerque nestled up against the upthrust of Sandia Crest. From their house all of Albuquerque was spread out to the west and south, while the tramway pylons and the trams could be seen to the east. I gave a lecture at the monthly meeting and taught two classes--advanced Hardanger and advanced blackwork. I drove down from Denver that warm late-summer day and arrived at Barb's place late in the afternoon. It was a hot day and my car was without air-conditioning, so I was nicely baked and sweaty upon arrival. After meeting John for the first time (Barbara and I knew each other from various region get-togethers and from being roommates in the 1987 National Seminar), I was shown to the guest room where I settled in. I decided to strip down, have a wash, and lie down to cool off and maybe doze for an hour or so before dinner. I pushed in the door lock, plied my wet washcloth, and lay down. Towards dinner time (we were going out to a local restaurant) I got up, got dressed, and opened the door to my bedroom. Only it wouldn't open. The lock was stuck. I knocked on the door and called for Barbara or John to help me out. No response. I heard the TV on quite loud. I knocked and shouted again. Then I heard the front door open and shut. I kept knocking. Again the front door opened and shut. Finally Barb came to my door. She had been answering the knocking at the front door. Well, John tried fiddling with the lock with no results. Then he told me to crawl out the bedroom window (it faced the front of the house on ground level). My crawling out of any window was ludicrous in anything but an extreme emergency--I am a large woman with a low center of gravity. Finally he decided to take the door off its hinges. That was really the best solution--I didn't want to have to crawl out of the window once, let alone several times in and out during my stay. So I was rescued, but John muttered to me that he didn't know why I had to lock the bedroom door. I had several other minor misadventures on that trip, but that was the one that Barb and I have laughed about over the years.

In 1995 I was teaching at the Denver National Seminar and the electricity for the whole hotel cut out. It turned out that there had been an early morning car accident where the car has crashed into a transformer knocking it out. The lights were out for eighteen hours. Luckily I was teaching in a corner suite with natural light coming in from two directions, so my class, Miss Shirley's Band Sampler, was barely impacted. Other teachers and other classes were not so lucky. In the evening after dark, since I was within five miles of home, I took some people back to the house so we could stitch. Luckily the lights for most of the hotel came back on that night. The next day we all sported T-shirts saying "I was at National Seminar when the lights went out."

Stonehenge

one of the embroideries I did while in England

blackwork, black silk on white linen, 10" X 14"

Wonderful things that have happened while I was traveling and teaching. In England I was hired to give a lecture and teach about blackwork. Just imagine my delight--to actually teach blackwork to the English! I was hired by the West Country Region of the Embroiderers' Guild. The lecture was set in the Salisbury Museum at Salisbury Cathedral. I was in a heavenly daze the whole time. Then the class was the next day and was held in a much more prosaic site. It was a building called the Boy Scout Hut. It was a long building set up for community classes, hardly what I would call a hut. One of the perks of being a teacher (or a tutor as I was called in England) was that lunch was part of my pay. I expect a brown bag with a sandwich, a banana, and a bottle of water, and in point of fact that is very rarely what I get served. This time at one end of the hut, a small table was set up with a cloth, and neat plastic dishes and cups for three. I was expecting the class organizer and her friend to sit with me, but no--two women from the class joined me, Belinda and Jane. The three of us were served an elegant little luncheon by one of the other women and all the rest of the class sat at the other end of the hut eating and talking. The three of us had a pleasant lunch, then we went back to the afternoon session of class. At the end of the day, after everyone was gone but the class organizer and myself, I asked her what was up with the lunch. Well, I had eaten lunch with the Countess of Caernarvon and the Countess of Montecute. I laughed all the way home.

I was in Salisbury quite a bit during our life in England. It was a hub of needlework with Jane Lemon and her group doing the huge needlework tapestries for the altars in the cathedral. But the best thing was that by going about five miles out of my way, I could drive past Stonehenge every time I drove south the Salisbury. One of the great things in my life was seeing Stonehenge at all seasons in all weather with a simple detour on the way to doing things that I love.