Title? I Don't Need No Stinkin' Title!

Seriously, my titles are usually a de facto thesis statement, and since this entry has no thesis to rally behind I swear I couldn’t think of a title at all. I’ve already used all the metaphors for collections…oh wait. I’ve got a good one. I think maybe I’ll turn these Friday blog entries into a series and call them Fridays With Magpies.

My husband has always said I’m a magpie because of my obsessive love for shiny, useless things. He’s right. I do have an obsessive love for shiny, useless things. Bits of crystal hang in my dining room window–an idea I stole from Pollyanna. Rainbows dance on the wall. How cool is that? Cooler yet is the fact that we’ve finally been able to get to the place where husband can pursue his lifelong dream of making stained glass. I think it’s a preacher’s kid thing. God knows the issues those PKs have with their dad’s boss and so God likes to hide in the beautiful places for them. When they have to look away from the pulpit with all its mixed messages they turn to the windows and see that God has a home not only in words but in craftsmanship and beauty. I don’t know a single PK who doesn’t love coloured glass in some way. Husband makes his stained glass. Aunt B. has a bottle tree.

I’m not a preacher’s kid, but I’m a preacher’s kid in law, I guess. So that’s my excuse. I still want a bottle tree, but we probably won’t have one until the oak is a bit larger. I think bottle trees look best when they’re old growth.

Okay. Oops. Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. Because I just now googled “bottle tree” to find a picture to attach, and they just have the ones that are dead trees or manufactured tree forms with bottles stuck over the ends of branches. When I think of the bottle tree I’d like to have, I want one where the blue bottles hang down from the living tree. I know it sounds silly, and probably antithetical to the idea of the bottle tree’s repurposing dead and empty things for beauty. But I like the idea of the bottles as bits of jewelry for the live oak. And few things depress me as much as tree corpses.

Here’s a link to a flickr photo of what I’m talking about: hanging bottle tree

I’m trying very much during this spate of painful depression to focus on the beauty around me and to realise ordinary magic of sunlight. I view these mild depressions that strike from time to time as a sort of tug of war between the darkness of entropy and the brightness of continued striving. So I usually turn to the striving. I make a thing. I write something, colour something, sew something, knit something, cook something. It helps.

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