The Joy of Deadhorse

I am planning a mosaic table for E and find myself surprisingly short of broken china and glassware. Not to worry, Himself and I consulted the tide tables and yesterday, got ourselves to Deadhorse Bay, Brooklyn at low tide.( I think I gave a brief history of this strange place on an earlier post--if not, take a few moments, research it, and come back prepared to tell the class what you have learned.)

This time, I shopped in the sand with much more discrimination. That's because I am still finding pieces of my fingers that I clipped off with those damn nippers every time I tried to trim curved pieces of glass for my last table.So this time, only flat pieces of glass or china, thank you, and only in colors. The only limiting factor was how much I could carry.

The harvest was plentiful.

All cleaned up back at home

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The wind was strong but so was the sun. I snuggled into my cobalt blue windbreaker (makes me blend in the beach glass, you'd never know I was there) so I was toasty warm. and best of all, I had Himself, just a few hundred feet away at all times. I was filled with happiness...imagine that literally because it is how it was. I don't know what it is about digging around in the dirt that gets me so energized but isn't it unbelievable that I have a guy who feels the same way? It felt all the more wonderful because just 24 hours before, I had bumped into my ex-husband at Shad Fest, the local street fair celebrating a really stinky fish that runs the Delaware River this week. 

How fitting. Because they both leave me with a really bad taste in my mouth.

But there on that Deadhorse Sunday, with my tall red rubber boots mired in sea muck, the past blew away and the wonder of my life at present was all around me.Himself found this for me.

This is how it looks, all nestled in my Garden of Earthly Delights, a shady spot beneath the maple tree where I plant hosta, astilbe, and all kinds of wonderful from our diggings. Here is the Deadhorse Bay Brass Ensemble:

Yep,that's a roller skate and I know you're old enough to remember them.

Here are the woodwinds:

This will be a fairy castle for a grandchild

Driftwood found in Maine with rocks intact!

A white platter from Deadhorse colored by saltwater.

But wait! There's more!

I even have the chicken feet, which are soaking. I found it at Deadhorse yesterday, along with this guy.

out of focus but you get the point

 And so in they go, with the rest of the Deadhorse Bay Collective.

I love assemblage and think I have finally have enough critters to tell a story in the old cheese boxes piled up on the shelf. 

I have so much to say about the joy of recognizing joy, but it is enough to share this, my beautiful Sunday, April 27, 2014. I know the tides will come in and nip around my heels again but for this moment, all is perfect.

Moving My Shards into Elul

And so the wheels of introspection move forward.

On a walk along the towpath with the dogs this morning, I spotted a great blue heron on the path ahead of us, just perched on the ground by the side of the canal. Billy finally noticed and charged ahead.The bird let him get about three feet away and then hopped in one single laugh of air to a log in the middle of the water. Three feet away. As if she knew that Billy only steps into water to lie down for a combination drink and mud bath.

And around the bend, another heron sitting on a rock in the middle of the pond. And yellow coneflowers. A network of groundhog (or anaconda) tunnels. Giant sycamores wound in some kind of ivy, with their bark shards ringing the ground. And drops of rain just here and there. I noticed everything around me and I got the message: I am part of it all. Connected. And perhaps that means I don't have to fight with life so much, just fold in. Just go, as Jude says.

I came home to start a project that has been on my list for approximately four summers. It starts with this:

These boxes contain broken bottles and shards of china that I have dug out of trash heaps in ghost towns throughout the West, from the surf at Deadhorse Bay, and from a really good midden that we found just across the river when I was trying to coax Himself to take up walking. Leave it to him to look down and find an ivory cuphandle sticking up under his boot, which meant we had no choice but to run home for our trowels and gloves. Which meant he never did have to go for the walk and, now that I think of it, he probably planted all that stuff there the day before.


Where was I?

Oh yeah, sorting shards by color so that I can enter them into The Permanent Record by making a mosaic on an old cafe table. I felt for the memory in each piece. And I felt the women who had tossed them into the trash. The one who put her mother's cobalt blue platter back in her china cabinet after Thanksgiving, the one who dusted ivory porcelain cups on a piece of lace on the shelf over the piano, the one who always hated the ochre vase her mother-in-law gave her and was SO happy when the cat knocked it over.

The woman who perhaps loved this:

Then there was my own collection of shards-to-be.

I used to have my little girls throw our broken ceramics into the field over the fence, planting shards for the archaelogists of the future. Just like all the other women?  Now, I save them for this project and today, I took a hammer to them...and folded them into the boxes with their ancestors.

 All one. All connected.