friendship rug

this past week, the remaining residents of anna's and my former house ("the garden") are packing up their stuff and moving out...

while i normally don't get emotional over vacating rentals*, the house that this rug represents was (and hopefully will be again) really something special. it became home to our group of friends 5 years ago, and during those years, 5 at a time (sometimes more, depending on if someone was sleeping in the hallways or in the "guest closet"), nearly all of our extended family of friends called it home. anna and i overlapped there for 3 years!

the house is beautiful, on a dead-end street in leafy cambridge. it is creaky and strange, retrofitted and re-retrofitted, with green wooden floors in the kitchen, orange walls in the dining room, bedrooms scattered up and down two stories, appended by porches, overgrown in the flowerbeds, stocked to the gills with everyone's leftovers (food-wise and other-wise), and really loved by anyone who's been there. which actually includes hundreds of people, when you count party-goers and sub-letters. still, there is a core of about a dozen of us who spent some seriously formative time there, and none of us left that house unchanged.

while cleaning the last of my crap out of the basement a couple of days ago, i snagged this BEAUTY of a rug that we all made, together, several winters ago up at dillys' cabin in new hampshire. i love this rug - because it is made of recycled woolen blankets and coats, because it lived in the garden for so many years, because cute eloise already favors naps on it, and because so many of us spent that cold and cosy weekend braiding bits of it and stitching it together.

thanks, garden!!!

*also, normally i don't write much personal on this blog but i figure, hey, the 5 people out there reading it might not mind a bit of background!