Mom Is Going to Rhinebeck Without Me

Well, Mom is going to Rhinebeck without me this year.

Technically, she has been going without me for years, because it has been years since I’ve been to the New York Sheep & Wool Festival. But this year feels a little different.

This year, Celtic Yarns will be there.

Mom will be heading to Rhinebeck with our yarn, setting up at the Dachshund Daddy Knits booth, surrounded by sheep, knitters, gorgeous sweaters, and enough yarn to make my bank account nervous just looking at pictures.

And I will be home in Maine.

As much as I would love to be there, I’m still recovering from cancer treatment. After chemotherapy and radiation, my body has made it abundantly clear that it would prefer I take things a little slower. Apparently, recovery is not the time to spend an entire weekend walking around a massive fiber festival, carrying bags of yarn, and convincing myself that I’m “just going to look.”

Which, let’s be honest, was never going to happen anyway.

I am cancer free now, and that is something I am incredibly grateful for. ❤️ But recovery takes time, and the chemotherapy-induced neuropathy has slowed me down too. It hasn’t stopped me from knitting, though. I’m still putting stitches on needles—even if those stitches occasionally take considerably longer than they used to.

So while Mom is in Rhinebeck, I’ll be experiencing the festival from several hundred miles away through photos, videos, texts, and probably FaceTime.

I have already mentally assigned her several jobs:

Take pictures of the booth.

Take pictures of the yarn.

Take pictures of interesting sweaters.

Take pictures of sheep.

Show me anything remotely interesting.

And most importantly, DO NOT BUY SOMETHING AMAZING WITHOUT SHOWING ME FIRST.

Celtic Yarns will have our Irish Aran yarn and Sport Weight Merino, both from our wonderful 300-year-old mill in Ireland. I’m sad that I won’t be there to see everyone’s reactions to the yarn in person, but I’m also incredibly proud that our little company will be represented at such an amazing fiber festival.

There is definitely a little FOMO involved.

But I’m learning that recovery means celebrating what I can do instead of beating myself up over what I can’t do yet.

So Mom gets Rhinebeck.

I’ll be here in Maine, knitting, recovering, editing Celtic Yarns videos, and demanding live updates.

And if she comes home with yarn that I haven’t approved of first?

Well.

We’ll have words.

After all, I may be recovering from cancer, but I still have standards. 🧶😂