Monday, March 29, 2010

SUNSHINE SPARKS MEMORIES

When I sit in my task chair at my desk in the early spring mornings as the sun starts it’s rise, it likes to send it’s glorious greeting directly into my eyes. I have a few choices: I can continue to sit in one position and allow the sun to permeate my vision obscuring the keys as I type at the keyboard and find out later what I really wrote or I can get up and close the blinds shutting out the sunshine-activation portion of my personality of the morning. Never having taken office classes, I pretty much need to see to type although I have been amazed at what occurs if I simply try to resist thinking and just let my fingers do the typing. It’s seemingly no worse than all the wrong hits my Parkinsonian misses have helped me manage lately anyway and if I sit long enough, the sun moves and I don’t have to. Added to that is the benefit I glean from the sunshine Vitamin D that manages to sneak though the layers of protective glass and soak into the skin of my face, so I can see (pun intended) I am in a win-win situation.
As I sit in the sunshine this morning I looked up to see the beautiful beams shining through a long-ago gift of glass, a stained glass piece made especially for me by dear friends in a shop named Crafts Elan where I worked in Caribou, Maine in the mid-1970s.
John and I had been on a trip to Texas and while there, he picked a Firewheel (common name Blanket Flower) I admired and gave it to me. I pressed it between layers of tissue and saved it in a book but always wanted it made into a stained glass hanging. When I asked the people where I worked, several took part in creating a lovely piece of art for me. Mary worked with dried flowers to create a design with the Firewheel at the center and Kolin arranged, designed, and soldered the stained glass piece. The owners of the shop allowed the work done by their artists done on shop time later presenting it with huge smiles as a loving gift to me.
Since that presentation day, the gift has been in many windows in many places: Caribou, Maine, Tucson, Arizona, Nashua, New Hampshire, Gifford, Illinois, and Huber Heights, Ohio. However, on its original trek little did we know that the handsome Firewheel flower that started out in Texas and traveled such a long way to go to Northern Maine would eventually find it’s retirement home in a sunny window back in West Texas.

1 comment:

  1. It's fun to wander down memory lane on a sunny day, isn't it?

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