thoughts & pearls
October 22, 2009
This is a story —
From the mountain. The second mountain, when things got a lot easier because I had neighbors within one mile dash distance and also aged wood. [Listen do not ever try to tough out a bad winter on a mountain alone with wood heat, no neighbors, one broken axe and green wood. That just never goes well.]
thoughts & pearls
One of my artist dates was pulling out all my jewelry and looking at it. “Artist Dates” are a thing I picked up in “The Artist’s Way” [that is Julia Cameron stuff] and I have somehow convinced about ten people to do Artist Way as a group so I am following along being encouraging and also doing the pages and dates even if I have already done Artist Way twice.
[Forget the first time I was an Artist Way Drop Out and crashed and burned on chapter 8. That is just impolite to mention.]
I do not get to wear my jewelry very often. This is the woods. There is just not a lot of call for fancy jewelry here. So it sits. Packed in its box. Actually several boxes, probably twenty-five because there are pieces of jewelry I love so much they get their own special boxes which then is confusing when you go looking for one piece but all those boxes go in one box. And that is one of the boxes I carry with me. Along with the computers. Computers and jewelry and a bag o’ shoes. That is me.
Last time I pulled out all my jewelry, my pearls were looking dim. And I thought, Your pearls are dying without you. You must wear them.
Pearls are like that. They are living things. If you neglect them, they fade. And can just die.
So.
This artist date has been, Be With Pearls. I pulled out all my pearls and put them on. And here I sit in a pair of burnt out sneakers and exercise pants and an oversized nightshirt and pearl earrings and bracelets and necklaces all over me in the woods. It is pretty funny. But I like it. And it is for me and the pearls.
I remember my grandmother too when I wear pearls. She said a woman should not wear pearls until she is thirty. [My grandmother was strict about stuff like that.] Also she thought women should not buy themselves pearls. Pearls should be inherited or bought for them by the man they marry.
That is okay. She was older. She knew pearls had to be worn to live too. I remember her wearing them just for that. And telling me all about pearls. She got married four times too and that is pretty racey for a grandmother so I think she just wanted me to know how things should be instead of how they are.
My grandmother loved me. She is gone now but I sure love her.
I think about her when I wear pearls.
Your Life With Pearls Adams Girl
where i got the art work :
i cribbed that off anita marie’s
where that story comes from :
that comes from seemaxrun
celluloid blonde 
My grandmother has been gone for twenty years. I still miss and love her dearly. Always will. I just wish my two younger daughters could have met her. That’s one of the toughest things about losing a grandparent, having children who can’t know them because they didn’t exist at the same time.
It pains my brain to think of these things.
My grandmother and mother had a falling out when I was nine and I wasn’t allowed to see her or write her after. When I got old enough to track her down on my own, she had died. And when my father died, the woman who cleaned him out and did not think it was necessary to tell me my father had died — bitch — took and/or got rid of everything before I got word, so I have no photos, no letters, nothing from my grandmother. Nothing physical. But I have my memories. And my memories are long.
That is heartbreaking and brutally unfair. Grandparents should never be separated from their grandchildren because of the parent’s problems with them.
Everyone should have at least one physical thing from a loved one. I know people frown on material things because they can’t love you back. But let me tell you something strange. When my brother visited me the year before he died, he left some cigarette butts in a tiny ashtray on a shelf I have on the patio. I found them a couple of months after he died and knew they were his. He smashed them a certain way that no one else did, a nervous habit he had.
This was three years ago and I just threw them out a couple of weeks ago.
His mobile phone number though, I’m not ever going to take that out of my contacts list. I don’t think.
I alternate between thinking it is aberrant I have dead people in my address book, and thinking, screw that I am not deleting that name.
Objects that relate to loved ones are not materialism. They are solid objects that embody the emotion you hold for that person. Like photographs, physical representations of the person that you may touch, see, to remember and re-experience that person.
I am sorry, Max, that you lost your grandmother twice. That is most unfair.
I was privileged to be with my grandmother when she died. I saw an angel stand beside her about an hour before she passed. Most people think I’m crazy when I say things like that.
That’s okay, though. My grandmother knows the truth.
The thing I wanted most from her things were her old dish pans. That, and the old ammo box we used to sit on when we were kids. Relatives swooped down upon all her belongings before I ever got a chance.
That happened with my great-grandmother, too. I so wanted all the years and years of research she had done on our family lineage. Her son threw it all away.
Who said families were loving? They were confused.
In response to your wonderfully written story: I think you should never have been alone on that mountain. I think, when we have communities that are sustainable and holistic and organic, one of the major parts of that is being together with loving people who work together. Community. Holism. Health. Nature. Healing.
Well, if I had been entirely alone on that mountain, I would be dead. I am terribly bad at asking for help or even letting anyone know I might need help. But that winter was bad, the roof was going out, storms ripped the solar panels down and carried them almost a mile down the mountain, the chimney blocked, the drive washed out, the water lines broke, the gas tank was too big to fill and a truck couldn’t have gotten in even if I could have filled it, there was no dry wood — irony so many trees were coming down in the storms, wood was everywhere but nothing you could burn. Things got pretty precarious that winter. And when I couldn’t make it all by myself anymore and finally did yell for help, help arrived. Good thing for me, if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.
Geez. Thank god you didn’t have to go cannibal. That sounds like absolute hell.
Put it this way. I wore through four pairs of work gloves that winter. As in, wore them into tattered rags.