My husband is making a beautiful mosaic. "Making" seems the wrong word in this case. We need a more precise, illustrative word for something so painstaking. You make dinner or a phonecall. A mosaic? Well, maybe you compose or craft or develop. I don't know. I just know it was going to be a Christmas present for his mom, and he's now about halfway done. He started by finding photos, then sketching his design, transferring the design to graph paper and then searching for a material to "mosaic" on. When he had an appropriately-sized piece of MDF, he transferred his design on to it and began searching for colors and materials--ceramic plates and glass tiles, in this case. And now, for months, he's been carefully matching colors, cutting each piece of ceramic or glass, and gluing it down into place. Any time he has about 45 minutes free, he'll sit down and work on it, finishing about 2 or 3 square inches in that amount of time. And it is beautiful. Mosaicking is making something out of nothing, pieces of broken plate fit for the trash become an image of a place that is sacred to his family.
Erin, my sister-in-law, is crocheting a blanket. She began it when a friend of hers was pregnant, for the new baby. But that baby has come and the blanket is nowhere near finished. Erin says she's using a very small crochet hook, for the first time, so the project is taking a long time, but she loves how it looks. She explained to me how if you hook through a certain loop with each stitch, you create a wave pattern through the whole blanket. It looks very cool, she said. She can work on it for hours while she and her husband listen to audio books. She is about 1/6 of the way finished. That new baby will probably never get it. Maybe someday an Erin baby will get it.
Stapled to my friend Wendy's wall is a large poster--Nine Generation Ancestral Chart. It's a 40-inch by 40-inch square; right in the center is her name and birth information--Wendy Andrus McKnight; May 3, 1947; Albuquerque, New Mexico. Then spreading out from the center in a circle are the names and life facts of a hundred of so of her progenitors, the four family lines of her parents each occupying a quarter of the circle, dividing themselves into smaller branched lines as they reach closer to the edge of the poster's circle. But there are many blank spots. Some lines have the names of all nine generations while some go blank after three of four. She writes often from her family history mission in Sydney, Australia, that she's hoping to find more on this line or that, that she's been working on linking Sarah Wright to her parents, or Johann Himmelman to his, but is still a bit stuck. It's there on the wall for all to see--an immense project that she may never finish but has obviously made amazing progress on. Names of real people, found and connected.
So now, a question. What have I got?
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