"Phractured" -- Mom's Panel

Waiting for Winter 

A story written for myself late last August, about my mother, in the final months of her Ahlzeimer's disease--a ten year "health sentence."  She passed last January, early in the year...the day before her 57th wedding anniversary.  I finally got back to the glass shop last week, and finished her panel.

It is early Saturday morning.  This is the best day of the week.  Even when it's raining-maybe especially then!  The one day I don't have to think about the office or anyone else's problems except family.  Any Saturday morning. Now it is perhaps 80 degrees, and I know as the sun comes up, it will rise to over 90 in the shop.  I love early mornings in the barn....Summer, Fall, Spring--but, I think, especially in the winter.  I visualize the winter now, to attempt "mental coolness." 

In December, January and February (and sometimes, if I am lucky-March) when it is freezing cold in the mornings, the air feels sharp as staples shot up into the nostrils, clean but stabbing.  At 5 am, the sky is still dark, and no light shows anywhere except behind me as the moon sets in a milky glow in the night sky.  Frost is hard icing on all things metal, the grass is frozen and crunches as I walk across it.  Sometimes I stumble, as the path is rough and uneven.  This, too is like life.    

But, since it is autumn now, I check on my sleeping mom, then walk carefully through dew soaked grass and head out to the barn with a thermal cup of coffee.  And I try to be glad that I don't have to fire up the woodstove.  In the winter, while I wait for the stove to heat my workspace, I'll walk over to the workbench and coffee-contemplate.  What is it for today-what can I accomplish in one day?  I have to wait for the warmth of the stove to reach the workbench-it is not easy to work with cold fingers and icy glass.  Waiting for the woodstove warmth is one of my favorite miracles.

But this autumn morning is temperate, so I dust off the current panel on the workbench, and try to visualize where it will end up.  Is this one for a friend, or for family?  Will I sell this one? 

It seems that often, often--as I approach the bench--I flash back, perhaps forty-five years, to my mom's warm voice while she enriched the child-me with magic stories and fables.  One of my favorites almost always comes to mind---the fanciful story of the Elves and the Shoemaker.  I almost expect some glass wizardry elves to have descended to my workspace in the dark of the night, and to have repaired with magic whatever I didn't like about the piece under construction.  (Elves?  If you're reading this, you are so welcome to our shop any night...please...) 

Mom and dad are still sleeping.  Momma has advanced Alzheimer's but still lives at home with dad.  (Elves?  If you're listening and know of the answer to Alz, would please stop by and "fix" my mom on any given night while we sleep?  She was always one of your biggest fans, and, like the honorable cobbler couple of old, these folks deserve better than their present circumstances.)

I am now working on a fractured-pattern done in all clear glass, with the majority of pieces done in trapezoid or triangular cuts.  Largest pieces to the outside, most angles pointing in, getting smaller as the eye moves to the center of the panel. 

No color, which is strange for me.  Every single piece of this clear glass is bubbled, swirled, patterned, etched and interesting.  Random angles, no wavy lines, just disconnects-like disjointed, fractured thoughts.  Like mom.  Like her mother, too, at grandma's end.

But I realize that I miss working with color.  Clear glass panels look clean and can have great visual impact.  The plus is that clear glass "goes" or "fits" in any room, but it seems to me to be cold somehow.  Ice-like.  Is it that the angles remind me of broken glass? or that the long shards look like stabbing icicles?  I decide, when it is completed, that I won't hang it in my house.  It is not me-yet.

Not mine. 

Would the panel feel warmer if the design were swirls and circles?  I contemplate this for a while.  Yes, if I do another all clear piece, I will try one with sweeping arcs and smooth edges to test this theory. 

But, I promise myself that the very next piece will be done in the rich, true cathedral colors:  blood ruby reds, deepest cobalt blue, mysteriously deep forest greens, hot sun yellows, golds and silvers and warm coppers for sparkle.  Life colors that feed the soul and capture the eye and heart.  Yes, the very next panel will be stuffed with rich color, life, movement, and warmth.  And the next.  And the one after that, too.

I decide, also, that all my in-the-future panels will contain colors and arcs, strong connecting lines that intersect like flowing memories, like swirling, connected emotions that know where they're going.  That hold it all together, structural strength for the colors. 

Yes, for as long as I can continue to create-I will use bold colors and honest, strong connections. 

I let myself hope-for just a moment-that there are many, many panels in my future, before I fracture and become disjointed and lose those connections to color, warmth and life.  I'll work through the fall, and wait for the good and bad of winter.

                 ~~~End

Well, the panel is completed now, and it sits in my living room window, a reminder of my mom, and the all the bright and shining moments in her life--The angles she worked, the points she made. 

The see through, clear, open and honest integrity of the woman she was. 

Mother, Daughter, Grandmom to so many...She illuminated so many people in her life.  People who just loved to be around her.

You were so loved. 

You still are.

This, from an article I had written last August, right after I joined the Gather Family of writers and artists.  That article is here:  http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977100567&nav=MyGather