Alacrity

The mosaic table that had been floating around my mind as a summer project for the past 4 summers is finally done...just as the summer calendar zips itself up and disappears.

Grouting turned out to be like making mudpies and hunting for treasure all at once. Imagine smearing grey oatmeal on a favorite picture and then just clearing it away over and over again to reveal the images below!

The story of this table is about sitting atop mounds in the desert, digging with a stick. One eye looking for color, the other eye guarding against snakes. It is also about all the crashes and "oops" in my kitchen. What a way to transform the feeling of loss into a surprise gift of tesserae (look it up).  And while I wanted this to be made entirely of my own finds, I have some full disclosure. I was at work last week, coveting a blue and white plate of Liza's as I bemoaned the fact that I was about 4 inches short of goods in the final cobalt blue ring. Lucky for me, she had another one just like, chipped and exiled to the back of the cupboard!

Like my quilts, I love some of the supporting characters almost as much as the story itself:

So what have I learned?

This was a lesson about alacrity, which the dictionary defines as "cheerful willingness or speed." In other words, the opposite of inertia. I can remember clearly the moment I actually got started on this, the very first snap of the very first shard. For weeks, I kept thinking, "Guess it is going to be another summer without making a table." As if it were a random event. Then, "I probably should start on that table..." to finally making the connection between a wish and my own hands. It took some real cerebral effort to ignite my energy. Not sure why, but at least I understand that every wish has a fuse that needs to be lit with something more flammable than dreams. 

Odds and Ends

Look at these cuties!

They're the new patches on my old shirts, masking (L) a stain and (R) a jagged tear from a vicious door knob.

These shirts were laying in my sewing basket for months...along with one red linen dress with a historical artifact (my drippy appetizer at a Mexican restaurant at the beginning of the summer). I was really pleased how the shirt mending came out but couldn't seem to create the right patch for the dress.

The next day (I am not making this up), I was mowing the lawnweeds and looked down to see this cradled in the errant roots of the sycamore tree.

Understand that we live no where near a parade ground. Or a flag store. Understand that in 17 years, I have never found a scrap of any fabric of any type on our property. I appreciate a sign when I see one, even if it is not really the right shade of salsa.

And in other news, the mosaic table is coming along nicely.

I have closed the nipper joint (not the blade, what do you think I am, stupid?) on the thumb of one hand and the palm of the other. I have stepped on the tiny shards that are colonizing into their own table beneath my work surface. And today, I stabbed myself with the microforceps I am using to pull up the dried tile adhesive. As I was placing each piece of the mosaic, I thought perhaps in ancient times, I would have been a tile artist. But I probably would have been dead of sepsis after the first atrium floor.

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.