Pieces and Parts

It's oft been said that 'home is where the heart is'. As I look around the huge room that encompasses work, reading, talking, eating, kitchen .... in short, life, I see echoes of everyone who has ever mattered to me. Just as people leave footprints on our hearts, so too do gifts leave footprints on our space.

I'm sitting in a chair my daughter and I found at an antique store in LA after breakfast one morning. This will always and forever more be 'Jordan's chair'. Beside that chair is a low table, music system tucked on the shelf. Atop the table is a beautiful bowl my mother made, flanked in the back by two hanging globes to shield a tealight candle, given to me by an ex-boss. Oh - the hanging globes are draped with initials - one has 'N', 'M', 'M', and the other has 'J', 'C'. One side is mine - Natalie, Misty, Matilda (both dogs now gone), the other is my daughter's - Jordan, Cali. We need to add initials - T for Tucker to mine, G for Gideon to Jordan's. And on the other side of the table is my father's chair, no longer a brown corduroy, now a gorgeous, supple red leather. In this one alcove I have father, mother, daughter. And this is only one little piece of my home. I look to the sitting area, see the hope chest I've had since forever, the same one Jordan's dad protected with about a million coats of shellac well before we were even married - and if anyone is doing the math, we were married in 1983. Making the hope chest appear even more rich, more sumptuous, is a rug given to me by my dear friends here in the Valley. The rug warms the entire room, pulls the eye, encourages one to sit, stay. Simple, life changing. Glancing upward at the walls, each mask tells a story - and most of the masks were given to me by friends and family. 

There is not one place the eye can land that doesn't resonate with someone's heart stamp.

Interestingly enough, the bedroom has but two pieces of artwork. One is a HUGE rendering of a woman, back to the viewer, draped in a sheet that covers her hips. Her hair is piled atop her head, and you see a bit of her profile. It's primarily the back, the lean length of thigh, that the viewer sees. It's beautiful - I fell in love with her and coveted her for a year before the purchase was finally made. And now she adorns the bedroom wall, the first thing you see when you walk into my apartment, since the bedroom door is always open. The second piece of artwork is a photo taken by a friend of mine entitled 'Coyote, Tree, Moon'. Elegant in its stark simplicity, the light that perfect twilight, leaching out of the sky, darkening against the earth.

Home. Heart.

A painting of a tulip, my favorite flower, given me by a talented writer friend - this gorgeous tulip was painted in one night. And, across the wall from the painting, is a tulip given me by my daughter, a tulip which sat on my desk in Cleveland, a tulip that, when I would look at it, I saw not the deep red of the tulip, but the brilliant smile of my blond daughter. 

Home. Heart.

A drawing of a woman in a red dress, leaping, exultant, above the earth - given to me by the same loving friends who allowed my sweet Mist to be buried on their property. She entitled it 'The Point of No Return'. It was given to me shortly after my second divorce. And when I look at her, I see joy, excitement, passion. 

Home. Heart.

We can't even GO into the kitchen ..... nearly every single thing in my kitchen, from silverware all the way through to my pots and pans, has a story. I could bore you to tears with the stories. And yet, when I take out my HUGE iron skillet, the same HUGE iron skillet that my mother and father used to prepare countless meals for the six of us kids growing up, it's not just that meal I think about. It's all the meals that came before it, all the cupboards in which that iron skillet has been nestled. And when I take out the hand-held blender I have, I always smile. It's probably one of the very first models ever made - and it's given to me by the queen of microwave cooking. I kid you not, this woman can create a gourmet feast using only the microwave. For one such as I, who loves to cook, loves the entire sensuous aspect of cooking, from choosing the foods, to the cutting, slicing, dicing, to the beginning notes of butter and oil heating up, all the way through to the finished product on the plate, I never thought I'd say microwave cooking was good. But when she does it, it's amazing.

Home. Heart.

Pieces and parts, whose sum is ever so much greater than the whole of the parts.