My great-grandfather, William, bought this mirror for my great-grandmother, Essie, when she was 23 years old and preparing to welcome their first and only child into the world. It was 1903, and the mirror was hand carved and stained, its roses and greenery hand-painted and adorned with gold highlights. Years later, after their deaths, my grandmother, Grace, inherited the mirror when she was pregnant with my father. She painted it the putty pink so popular in the 1930s, and it hung in his bedroom for many years. When my father brought home his German bride and first child (me), the mirror was passed to my mother, who painted it gold, according to the black-and-gold motifs fashionable in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Twenty years later, when I was pregnant with my first child, my mother gave me the mirror, which I painted white, a trend in the early 1980s. Recently, four of my adult children made exodus from my home and I was left with three near-empty bedrooms. In the process of renovating these spaces, I decided to strip the mirror and restore it to its original state. After the first round of stripping it, though, a thorough baptism and scrubbing left it in this state, which chronicles its evolution from its original state through the colorways and trends of each successive era. When I imagined each matriarch adding her era’s imprint to it, I had to take a step back and reconsider a full restoration. My youngest daughter and I looked at it in wonder and fell in love with the historical record, and left it as is. I think it’s quite lovely and every time I see it now, I thank the Grandmothers. #grandmother #matriarchy #antique
Mama Cat. I have so much respect for her. She was the teenage mom of six (six!) babies the first time we met her in our barn. The second time a tomcat got her, she was still nursing her first litter. She killed rabbits, moles, rats, and possums for her babies, dragging them into the barn. We’d find the bones later, picked clean. // Today, she’s a fully domesticated house cat. Sitting by the fire, lolling about on the sofa. But all the while, there is a gleam in her eyes—the glint of the hunter able, ready, and willing to tear the throat out of anything needed for survival, or for the survival of her babies. // So, ... when she deigns to visit me in my bedroom, we purr head to head, understanding the wild, exuberant, nurturing, and deadly love of the Mother.
“Alex, I’ll take ‘Things Mom Finds in the Freezer’ for 500, please.” [...] In years gone by I’ve found a stash of snowballs, large icicles, a deceased pet hamster, and a field mouse (among other things) in the freezer. Now that my children are grown, I find entire pears submerged in ??? #onlylordknows #freezerfinds #wtfisthis 👀
Thanks for the quote. I like Walt Whitman. I have been thinking about writing a blog post on his poetry.
I don’t know; I didn’t know there was an International Bloggers. :o)
Great minds, and all that. I really like the quote. Go forth in the bold day… sometimes it seems Go bold forth in the day, for me.
Isn’t that the International Bloggers’ Motto?