Love-hate with glass
I have a little glass coffee table in my den/guest room. I selected the glass because it would allow me to see the books or periodicals on the bottom shelf. Otherwise, I imagined I would forget them until they overflowed the space and needed to be recycled before I ever read them.
But after I got it, I hated the glass because it publicized my challenges with cleaning and keeping my fingerprints off of anything.
As we were stuck at home during COVID, the glass on the table became irritating enough to prompt action, and I decided that it needed to be covered to shield my glass inadequacies–if only from myself.
A week’s effort for a solution
In a past life with younger eyes, I made gift quilts for events like baby showers and marriages. I still have some leftover fabric, so I decided a primitive quilt tabletop could detract from less-than-clean glass. I lowered my standards for a quality quilt, made a design of little strips that looked like “uneven” was part of the plan, and used material I had on hand so I didn’t need to shop and make decisions about fabric. “Just get it done” was my motto.
The far-less-than-perfect little quilt took me one week of my time, and that seems to be my attention span these days. When finished, it bunched in the middle, and I could have “quilted” it to manage the surplus, but I decided to tolerate the puffy center and move on.
I got the little bugger done to my “good is OK standards” and enjoyed being able to ignore the fingerprints and dust on the glass for a more extended amount of time.
I want to be a creator, but I’ve been mostly an endurer
Maybe that quilt can be a model for writing about difficult times in my life. I’ve felt my past decisions and the consequences are too complex to describe with words in a week. My mind is too chaotic to untangle in a week. There is too much heartache to salve in a week.
I don’t have enough depth to be ponderous or to pontificate. Not much wisdom to package and share. All I can write about are my struggles as an old critter with a past of smudges and telling fingerprints to come to grips with. And at this time, nobody but me cares.
There is no prettying up the dark spots of my life, but trying to unearth them in creative little chunks may help me untangle grief and incomprehension with a bit of joy. It will beat the heck out of just hanging on and writing because I think it needs to be done. It doesn’t.
I’m moving on one week at a time.