Boxes

We drove down to Southern California to visit with relatives a couple of weekends ago. Now that we don’t have kids at home, we packed our car with room to spare and took off for a long weekend. I had one box of jewelry to return to my friend and business associate, Aileen. I sold some of her sea glass jewelry over the holidays. But somehow when we packed the car to come back home it was stuffed to the gills with boxes. It seems every house we went to had stuff for us to take home. I think we ended up with about five extra boxes. My husband growled a bit about it.

My mom had a set of encyclopedias that my dad and his best friend bought the year I was born. They were young and the door-to-door salesman convinced them what a good investment those books would be over the years. As it turned out, they were. I couldn’t just let her throw them out. I spent many hours with those books doing my research and reports for school over the years. Kids today don’t even know what an encyclopedia is. They just "Google" it. I actually plan on using them in my collage art. I don’t know if I’ll actually be able to tear them apart but they do inspire me. I’ll keep you updated on what I do with them. I can always scan the images and use them.



At my brother-in-law's house we ended up going through boxes in his garage. I was looking for a few vintage photographs of my husband’s grandparents. My brother-in-law couldn’t remember if he had them or not. We started going through the boxes and finding all kinds of fun things. Not only did I find some of the photos I was looking for but we found the original stuffing recipe in my mother-in-law’s handwriting. I blogged about this recipe at Thanksgiving. There was actually a photo copy in the folder that she probably made about the time we asked about the recipe. So I took some photos of the originals and took the copy. I plan on making a collage with it and putting a copy of the recipe in our cookbook. What I didn’t realize as we were looking through all of these memories was it was my mother-in-law’s birthday. My husband and his brother finally did realize it and I think their mom was guiding them through the boxes. We found things like menus for every holiday meal since 1958 when she was pregnant with my husband, and things she jotted down that my brother-in-law said when he was three. If I had remembered it was her birthday I might have had goose bumps the whole time I was looking through the boxes.



My plan this year is to do some collages that capture the essence of some of our family members. I’ll be scanning and using the memorabilia I have collected over the years. I am also offering this art form to others if they have someone they want to capture in an image. It’s easy to put things in a box on a shelf and forget about them. It’s healing to pull them off that shelf and remember the good things and where you come from.

If you want me to help you with your memories, send me an email! I can create a custom piece for you.