I Love My Room

 I love my room. My bedroom. The room that is almost a journal through my life that you could read if you just knew how to  interpret its colours and contents. It contains entries made since moving to Texada. There are precious things from my glassy life-before-essential-tremor as well.  

This morning I awoke facing the wall on which hangs a seemingly unrelated collection of items. At first I focussed on a slumped glass piece by Melanie Rowe. To me, it is a hybrid of mask, breastplate, necklace made of irridescent jewel tone feathers forming the mask with chains of suspended irridescent beads below. Two of the chains are finished off with quartz  crystals.

The crystals take me back to my archaeology ambitiions when I had just completed my first field school on the dig that explored the soil under what became the parking lot of the Fraser Arms in south Vancouver. I was then hired by a UBC team who were exploring a site in the village of Musqueam. Just below the soil in “my” pit was a layer of red ochre that took tedious days to carefully remove. When I got once more into the soil beneath the ochre, “my” pit proved remarkably artifact free with one exciting exception. I unearthed a large quartz crystal that is now housed in the Museum of Anthropology at UBC.

Then I started wondering about why I’d grouped the four items as I had. It had been an unconscious decision. What ties them together? 

Well, to the left of the mask hangs a carrving by a local Indiginous carver, Greg Whitesell called “Moon”. That connection seems obvious ... quartz, Musqueam, Indiginous carving.

To the right of Melanie’s piece is a kilnformed piece of a very stylized tree using irridescent bits and crushed clear glass that I made in a class with Yves Trudeau. Again, the connection is pretty obvious.

But I was puzzled about the piece to the right of that. It is a very small green

leaf mounted in a dark circular frame the colour of the carving. It is a stylized leaf I embroidered from a kit I bought in England many years ago. Of course! A leaf for the leafless glass tree on its left.

Four things. Four things that write such happy memories of my life. My room is full of them.