This is my sister Tara.  The day after this picture was taken she took off in her car full of belongings headed for Colorado on a long adventure that would take her to Tennessee and then back to Colorado for a meditation retreat for two months and then…?  We had been shopping for skirts for her.  She couldn’t find what she was looking for.

There was a moment in Target when a whole lot of information coalesced in my head to deliver this message: the skirt my sister is looking for is something I can make in less than two hours from fabric we can buy at the store.  It isn’t often when a moment of clarity shows me how I can be of service to my sister.

Her birthday is soon.  I told her I would make her a skirt for her birthday.An A-line skirt of knit fabric.  Casual, comfortable, classic.

Tara and I do not have the same style but we both love a few of the same classics.  The A-line skirt is one of them.  It looks good on both of us.  I made her two.

Tara is one of my favorite models.  We didn’t take much time with this photo shoot.  Time was wastin’ and the hour was nigh.  In the morning she took off for hot tarmac winding relentlessly through Utah, Wyoming, and finally Colorado.

Then a few days later she flew back to us from Tennessee where she was supposed to work the Bonnaroo concert for ten days.  She flew back to be close to our mom during her emergency hospitalization.  No one wanted her to give up her job to come home.

Except that I desperately wanted her to come home.

She did.

I made her two knit skirts.  One plum and one blue.

She’s going to fly the coop again soon.  It’s almost time for her to rejoin her solo adventure.  It’s almost time for her to find her meditation and her healing again.  I’m used to letting my sister go.

I’m going to fortune tell here: if my sister would shed her native guilt she will find she has an incredible power to heal people, to heal herself, and to blaze new pathways through life.  If I could erase her self doubt through an A-line skirt – it would already be done.