Thank You

“Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow”

~ Swedish Proverb

There are no words to express how much your kindness and concern have meant to me.  I can't tell you how many times, over these last few months, I've gone back and re-read your comments and emails and drawn strength from your words.  

All I can say is "Thank you!" and try to live my thanks by following your examples of friendship and caring.  

It's been a slow and halting climb out of the gloom that was threatening to consume me earlier this year.  But there is enough sun shining in my life now that I find myself missing blogging and, most of all, missing all of you.  :)

And so, I've been trying to decide whether or not to come back to blogging...  and, more specifically, whether or not I should come back to this blog.  

It seems like the blogging part of my life has been organized in stages around my friend Susan.  I started my first blog (The Wedding Dress Saga) to document the process of sewing her wedding dress.  That blog ended naturally when she and Matt were married on March 8, 2008.  

At that point, I wanted to keep blogging, so I started this blog (After the Dress) as a chronicle of my new sewing projects.  It was a wonderful 4 year run, with over 850 posts.  

And then, on March 3rd, 2012, Susan passed away after suffering a completely unexpected stroke several days earlier.  I tried to keep blogging for a while, but my sorrow from the loss of this beautiful young friend of mine - a wife and mother to a 2-year-old son - combined with other challenges in my life at the time, overwhelmed me and I had to cut down on the many commitments in my life while I tried to recover...  

Even though this blog wasn't dedicated specifically to her, it feels like it belongs to a time in my life when Susan was here on this earth - and I could call her up any time, we'd meet for lunch, laugh over toddler stories and share our excitement over new sewing projects...  Coming back here without her just didn't seem right.  

So, after a lot of thinking, I've decided to start a new blog.  

I hope you'll come visit my new blog - while it will be different in some ways from this blog, I'll still be posting about sewing and stories from my ESL classes - and I'll still have pictures of our cats and from our summer vacations.  :)

Regardless of whether or not you decide to join me on my new blog, I want you to know that you have doubled my joys and halved my sorrows over these last few years.  From the bottom of my heart, thank you.