Today's Beautiful Thing

I’ve discovered that there’s no real magic in having a deadline (unless there’s someone there with a whip or docking sheet to make you pay for being late). I’m one short of a taskmaster (thank Heavens!) so my Thursday deadline keeps getting ignored because other things are also important. I need a better motivation.

This leads me to think of something else that is exercising my mind. Last year was a disastrous year for us (with the single ineffable exception of the birth of my granddaughter in June. Oh, and the remarkable joy of having my youngest daughter and my grandson move in with us in November. And then there was the astounding experience of having all our children together with us at Christmas). Hmmm, let me rephrase that statement.

Last year was a disastrous year for us financially, and, to a lesser degree, in terms of my physical well-being. I’ve had a series of small, worrisome maladies, from sties to lumps to boils to infections. Never overly serious, always painful, always unattractive, always there. I don’t believe I had a single day last year when one of those was not present. But that’s not what I want to talk about – the result of all of that is my point. In the same way that a pebble in my shoe can make me oblivious to the beautiful scenery through which I’m passing, all of those minor ailments were a serious distraction from the beautiful things in my life.

This year, I want to change my metaphor. I’m throwing away the pebble/shoe idea and I’m going to think of myself as an oyster. When an irritant gets into my shell, like a stye or a lump, I’m going to use that as a reminder to go look for something in my life that I like – and I’m going to use that joy to smooth a layer of nacre over that irritant. By the end of the year, I expect to have a pearl where before there was only irritation.

So, because I had yet another stye start swelling my poor eye yesterday, I’m going to lay my first bit of nacre.

I love that thrill that comes when I pile a collection of materials on my counter and prepare to create something completely new out of them. Usually, by that point, I’ve already gone through the stages of casting about for an idea, getting sudden inspiration, and writing a materials list. Then I’ve felt the rising anticipation as I set about collecting or buying the materials, dealing with problems of availability or even possibility, before finally dumping them all out to begin. But the project I started yesterday was different.

Yesterday, I already knew what I would be making: I wanted a papier mâché model of a particular landscape (for yet another project) so the parameters were already set. That was my first set-back – since the parameters were set, that meant I’d have to use math to work it out to scale. Ack! The Dreaded Math Problem! (And let me assure you that this kind of thing was never one of the “problems” worked out in class. There were no trains running towards one another, nor imaginary numbers that needed to fit into some fraction of an idea! No, I had to figure out how 1000 feet could be divided conveniently into 18½ inches so that a 5½ foot tall person could be honestly portrayed by the toothpicks I’ve set aside for that purpose.) I fretted and fretted over it, burning up sheet after sheet of paper with my pencil and (mostly my) eraser until I gave up and decided to just make it the size I want and then work out the scale later.

So, I transferred my picture onto the back of a large piece of my longest Christmas wrapping paper, and covered it all with clear contact paper so that the moisture wouldn’t hurt my dining table (because this model IS the size of my dining table), and you know what? The dimensions worked out just fine. When I divided the length of the line designated as “1000 feet” into…um…I guess that would be 1000….and then compared that to the ¼ inch graph paper for my…er…other dimension…..anyway, it worked out to 15 feet per square. Isn’t that a nice round number? (Don’t worry, I had Ed check my equations.) So, there I was with this nice drawing and no more math to do! Hooray!

I gathered my Google Earth picture (for reference), paper, hardware cloth, wire cutters and pliers, a dish tub, flour, water, and a whisk, and stood, staring at the crude drawing, and enjoyed that feeling of impending creation. I wonder if God felt this way just before He said, “Let there be light”? I hope so – it’s a wonderful feeling!

Anyway, once I got the armature finished for the hill and cliff along the river, in no time at all I was up to my elbows in flour paste (and splattered liberally across my shirt and pants, too – and how did that glob get onto the back of my head?). I exuberantly tore rolls of thin masking paper into strips, baptized them righteously in the flour paste, and arranged them with abandon across my miniature landscape. I covered my wire armature with a mummy’s closet-worth of ragged bands, smoothing them gently into the cliff face that looms over my Sharpie-colored river.

Not liking the overly-flat surface elsewhere, I crumpled aluminum foil into small hillocks and dells, laying more saturated strips over them, criss-crossing them like a football coach’s playbook. When I finally had every inch covered with multiple layers, I squeezed the paste out of the last handfuls of paper strips still in my dish pan, and stretched them out into long, thin, mashed glumps (technical term, that) to form the banks of the river. Then I left it to dry. The first stage was done, and it was a damp, lumpy, wheat-smelling thing of beauty!

I didn’t HAVE to tell you the whole process (so far). The beautiful thing in my life yesterday was the thrill of starting something creative. But, the beautiful thing in my life today, was telling you about it so that I could experience it again. (Because, alas, it is taking all day today to dry, so I can’t play with it again until tomorrow – I mean, work on it. Yeah, that’s right.) So, the beautiful thing in my life today (other than it being my son’s birthday and having him here for the weekend) is telling someone else about something I’m excited about. I can hardly wait to find out what is going to be my beautiful thing tomorrow! This oyster thing is really working out well, so far.