Deb Brandon 
We stayed in Israel for two weeks. I woke up on the morning of our departure, my right eye felt itchy. I shrugged it off, probably allergies. By the time we landed in Boston, my eye was swollen shut and weeping. The next evening, both eyes were itchy, and by the morning of me return home, both eyes were swollen. Opening them was painful, and when I did, all I could see was blurry shapes and colors.
I moved to my new home a few months ago and am still in the process of unpacking. Not yet in the habit of placing items in appointed places I often forget where I put them. I’ve lost my glasses several times and occasionally my phone has shown up in odd locations, as has my wallet. Finding my phone hasn’t been a problem—I just asked my partner, Cindy, to call it, so I could find it by sound (unless it wasn’t on vibrate). But when it came to my glasses or wallet, I had to do it the old-fashioned way.
Where should I start? The first time I experienced a seizure? The first time I was diagnosed with psychogenic seizures by that awful neurologist? What about beginning with my sojourn in the epilepsy monitoring unit, several years into my recovery?
There’s so much to this story, so many twists and turns. Whenever I think about the topic, my emotions dart all over the place—frustration, anger, and resentment, grief and sadness, and finally relief that for the most part, I’ve come to terms with the whole story.
Standing in line behind her in Starbucks, I observed her as she leaned nonchalantly against the counter. I knew that stance—that was me, more than a decade ago, the slight swaying in the nonexistent breeze, the carefully annunciated speech, and the slow response to the barista’s terse questions. There was no doubt—this tall, skinny, unkempt woman was a brain injury survivor, in her early days of recovery.
As my first full draft of my book “Threads Around the World: From Arabian Weaving to Batik in Zimbabwe” neared completion, I started thinking of a second volume. I told myself that if the book was well received I’d write a second book.
The stories behind traditional textiles expose our commonalities—we have too much in common with each other to be divided into us and them, to be regarded as more or less. Stories allow us to acknowledge the person in each other.