Dream Weaver
Despite being a very future-oriented person, I find myself in the memory keeper’s role. A life-long boundary-pusher, my home is a place where memories come to settle. I have furnished it with pieces I found on the side of the road, in garage sales, or old barns. Collecting pieces from other people’s lives, I took them home and made them my own. I guess that’s telling.
When my mother died, I inherited things that were iconic in her life. I didn’t realize this until recently. My brother and I amicably divided the items we chose to keep. He needed a table and chairs, he had a spare bedroom to furnish, and a spot in his home for a beautiful mahogany console table. I made a space for the sideboard, a mahogany piece that was to be the first of a dining room set my parents never completed. I had a china cabinet, in which I displayed the beautiful hand painted bone china she received as a wedding gift, and her collection of 24 delicate tea cups and saucers. The sideboard is home to silverware and serving dishes.
My mother’s stuff found a home in my home, integrated into the memory-keeper’s nest. During the pandemic, I painted the dining room, had a panel made for the big old table, and refinished the china cabinet. The promised three-week confinement period stretched into two years, and the room originally meant to welcome friends and family for meals morphed into my office. After much debate over re-purposing the space, I decided it didn’t make sense to leave a beautiful south-facing sun-filled room unused. Now, the big oak table is my paper-covered workspace, and my little writing desk looks out into the garden, where I can watch the sunrise as I fill my morning pages.
I can see now that the way I created my home is the reflection of the way I create everything. They say what we make on the outside is a reflection of what we create on the inside. Looking at the space I have created for myself from the threads I have chosen, I can see that I am a weaver. On the warp of my past, I choose threads of my own, and weave them into a tapestry of my own design.
This is what I do. I choose what is worth keeping, and I use it to make something new. It is how I make art, integrating materials that have served their purpose into new paintings. It is how I write my stories. Something from the past, and something present. Somethings I intuit, and somethings I see.
The old and the new, woven into something different, a vision I can share, on paper or canvas, in pictures and words.