This is a story about a ring. At one time, this ring was on the hand of my great aunt Julia Reed. I don’t know how it got there. Maybe it was a wedding ring. My mother gave me the name Julia for my middle name. Aunt Julia raised my mom when she was younger and her own mother couldn’t handle raising four young girls. She split them up between relatives. Sometimes my grandma (who I don’t remember at all) would sweep into town, gather up all the girls in a fit of maternal guilt, and try to take care of them for a while. But soon she’d cut out. My mom and her three older sisters would try to fend for themselves. Sometimes the neighbors helped out; sometimes they didn’t. Then the relatives would come and take the girls into their care until Grandma came and got them again. Needless to say, my mother didn’t have a very stable home life. She was out on her own at age fourteen with a fake ID working in San Francisco and living with her older sister Novelle.

My mom loved Aunt Julia. She was like the mother my mom never really had. Aunt Julia was ahead of her time. She wrote newspaper articles for the town paper in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She was married to a wonderful man and never had any children of her own. I remember when I was about eleven, she came to stay with our family a little while. She seemed old to me then, but I was young, so what did I know? She wore support hose, and sensible shoes, and her hair was in a tight bun on the top of her head. She had pink powdery cheeks and a strange southern accent. She convinced my mom to drive us to the art store, and she bought some beautiful blue glass stones and a little round mirror, and glued them on cardboard so it looked like blue mountains surrounding a crystal clear lake. She was funny and creative and loving to my mom.

When I was in college I started signing my papers with my full name. One of my professors thought that my first name was Julia and started calling me that. I tried to correct him one day after class, and he said, “I like ‘Julia’ better,” and he just kept referring to me as Julia. I didn’t really mind.

When Aunt Julia died, my mom went to Arkansas. She didn’t go to the funeral. She never, ever went to funerals. If everyone got together for a funeral, she stayed home and cleaned the kitchen and got the food ready, but she never went herself. Even when my cousin, her niece died, she refused to go to the funeral. It really pissed off her sister, Louise, but mom didn’t care. The story goes that when my mom was little, her grandfather died and they laid his body out in the parlor and put pennies over his eyes. They made all the children walk by the body to pay their respects and the sight of dead grandfather, whom she adored, freaked her out so bad that she refused to go to another funeral ever again. And as far as I know, she never did. But she did go to Arkansas to be with the rest of her family.

Well, my mom came home with Aunt Julia’s diamond ring. I guess there was a big stink among the relatives over that ring. But mom didn’t care. Julia had left it to her, and she took it and flew home. I don’t think she ever went back to Arkansas again. She wore the ring all the time.

The summer before last, I was working in the garden at my parents’ home. I dug up a big patch under the kitchen window. I pulled weeds, rototilled, sifted out the big clods of dirt, turned the soil again, and raked. I was down on my hands and knees in the dirt pulling out little stones when I saw something shiny and pulled it out. It was my mom’s diamond ring– the one that had been Aunt Julia’s. My mom had lost a lot of weight, and it must have fallen off her finger while she was working in the garden. It was a miracle that the ring hadn’t been buried in the dirt forever. I showed it to my aunt Novelle who was visiting at the time. She said, “You were meant to have that ring.” We didn’t say anything to my mom about it because we didn’t want to upset her. I gave it to my dad, and he put it away for safe-keeping.

After my mom passed away, my dad came to me and said, “Before your mother died, she told me that she wanted you to have Aunt Julia’s ring.” He gave it to me on my fiftieth birthday.

When I took it to the jeweler’s to have it resized, they said that it is over seventy years old. They showed me how when you look at the center of the largest diamond, you can see a circle. At the time the ring was made, they didn’t have the technology to cut a the bottom of a diamond into a point the way they do now, so the tip underneath is flat instead of pointed. A lot of the prongs had been worn down over the years, so I had them replaced.

The other day, I picked the ring up from the jeweler’s. As I placed it on my finger, I felt so grateful that mom had given me this piece of her family’s history. Not a day goes by that I don’t look at it and think about how lucky I have been in my life.

Christmas Paper Dolls

When I was eight, I wasn’t getting an allowance or any money of my own. I don’t remember even thinking that it was a possibility to ask for money to buy something. It just wasn’t within my realm of experience at that time. So you can imagine my incredible glee when, as I was walking home from school, dragging the inside of my foot along the gutter in order to kick-up the leaves, I spotted a one dollar bill. A one dollar bill! I was so excited, I scooped it up and ran the rest of the way home.

“Look Mom! Look!” I breathlessly yelled to my mother as I proudly held the crumbled bill up for her to see. She was very happy for me and told me to put it in a safe place.

From the moment I got that dollar I couldn’t stop thinking about how I was going to spend it. Maybe I could buy some Barbie clothes, or some candy. Maybe I could get a 45 record like my older friend, Gail.

The next time Mom went shopping, she took me to the variety store in the little strip mall. I walked up and down the aisle. I had never really gone shopping for myself before, and I must have taken a long time checking the inky adhesive price tags on every little thing. It soon dawned on me that most of what I had originally wanted to buy was beyond my reach financially. But then I went to the coloring book section, and there on the top shelf, spread out in all their glory, were the smooth, colorful covers of the paper doll books. I don’t remember which ones I bought, but I do know that they were only a quarter a piece, and that I ended up buying four of them — one for me, and one for each of my sisters. Mom must have paid the tax . . . or maybe there wasn’t any tax. I really don’t remember.

I do remember that when I got home to my sisters and pulled the paper dolls out of the brown kraft paper bag, I got my first memory of what it felt like to buy something for someone else and how good it felt. We played with those paper dolls for hours. And even though my youngest sister was a little too young to cut them out, I helped her, and we had a lot of fun.

Other times, I would take the old Sears catalog and cut out the pictures of girls and their fashions and try to turn them into paper dolls. I even would try and make those tabs around the edges to keep them on the “dolls.” But the paper was too floppy, and it never worked out very well. Still, I could spend hours just cutting and trimming and giving each girl a name and a family and a history.

I loved paper dolls when I was little, so when I saw some French paper doll sheets for sale at a flea market a couple of years ago, I bought them, thinking I could use them in my art. And then I found some more in some old editions of Ladies Home Journal that I had purchased. So I decided to scan them, clean them up a bit, and put them on the Public Domain Images page on my web site. Now I have about fifteen pages of Paper Dolls and other vintage paper crafts on my web site.

As I was working on these images on my computer, I kept wanting to get back to making my Gothic Fairies. It occurred to me that when I’m making these little collages I’m cutting and pasting paper dolls again, and giving them names, and families, and stories, just like I did when I was a little girl. So I guess that love for paper never went away.

During the summer of 2005 my mom started to do unusual, compulsive things as a result of her Alzheimer’s. One of the things she did for hours on end, was to dead-head the flowers in the garden and put the seeds, pods, leaves, stems, and blossoms into arrangements everywhere. I told my sisters that she was trying to make order out of chaos. Everything she touched became a work of art, so I started photographing what she had done. I will post those here occasionally.

So my husband, my son, and I went for a quick visit to my dad’s. I can’t help but miss my mom when I’m up there. I can’t believe it’s only been four months since she died. Sometimes it feels like forever ago; sometimes it feels like she was just in the room.

I am a fairly early riser usually. And I like to stay up late as well. So once in a while, I take a mid-afternoon nap to try to catch-up with my sleep. But last Saturday, as I sat on the couch reading a magazine at about 11:00 a.m., I started to feel my eyelids get heavy, and soon stretched out and fell asleep — which is a very strange thing for me to do. While I was asleep I had the same dream about my mother - twice.

I was sitting at the dining room table drinking orange juice from a coffee cup, alone in the morning quiet. Mom walked into the room wearing her green velor robe and smiling at me. Her hair had been newly done and looked vibrant auburn and neatly styled — not the way she looked in the last few months of her illness when we could barely get it washed and combed. I looked up at her, and she smiled at me, and I started crying. I felt as though my whole body was shuddering with my sobbing. She reached across the table and held my had. “I miss you so much,” I said to her. She didn’t say a word to me, just pulled me from my chair and put her arms around me. Even now, a week later, I can feel the feeling of her slender but strong arms wrapped around me, holding me close. I was crying in her arms as she stroked my hair.

You know what it’s like when you have a nightmare that you want to escape and you force yourself to wake up just a little or you roll over to interrupt the images? That’s what I did. But I didn’t wake all the way up. Instead I had the exact same dream for a second time.

At the exact same moment, I forced myself awake — all the way this time. My husband was sitting in the recliner next to me watching football. “Did I say anything in my sleep?” I asked him.
“No,” he replied. “Why?”
“I just had the strangest dream.” I was so surprised that I hadn’t been crying in my sleep. My body felt achy, like it does after a good cry, and I just couldn’t shake the image and the touch of mom out of head. And I still can’t.

Kneel to the Prettiest

Last week I received an acceptance letter from the Art League of Northern California which is located near me in Novato. I had submitted jpegs of three of my Broken Doll altered books to their 3rd Annual National Juried Exhibition. I wasn’t sure which of the six altered books I should submit, so I let my son John decide. They rejected two of the pieces, but accepted Fear. The letter said they had over 400 entries and were only able to selet 62 pieces, so I’m pretty excited that one of my altered books were among those chosen. The Opening Reception is scheduled for Saturday, September 9, 2006 from 5 - 8 p.m. My husband will be in Greece, so hopefully my sister will be able to go with me for moral support.

Although I still have a lot of ideas for my Broken Dolls series of books that I want to play around with, I’ve decided to to some more Wall Hangings for a while. I need to take a break from the dark, weirdness of that other work for a while and work with some bright colors. I’ve had a book on my shelf for over a year now; it’s called Saffron Skies. I’ve had an idea for that book swirling in my head since I first got it, so I spent the afternoon painting paper shades of pink and splattering the pages with halo pink-gold and metallic gold. So much fun. And to make it even more enjoyable . . . I’m working in a clean, uncluttered work space!! HOORAY! We’ll see how long that lasts . . .

Feng Shui :: The Chinese art of positioning objects in buildings and other places based on the belief in positive and negative effects of the patterns of yin and yang and the flow of chi, the vital force or energy inherent in all things.

It is hot, hot, hot!! In my attempt to keep cool in my non-air conditioned house, I’ve taken to wearing a cold, wet hand towel around my shoulders. Kind a damp shawl, if you will. Exhausted from the heat yesterday, I lay down on the carpet next to the big fan and fell asleep. It reminded me of when I was little, and, if it was really hot, I’d sleep on the cool linoleum tiled floor in my bedroom. In the early morning hours I’d start to feel cold, but being half-asleep, instead of climbing into bed and pulling up the covers, I reach over and grab the throw rug and pull it on top of me. In the morning I’d wake up with dust bunnies and cookie crumbs from under the rug stuck to my skin and hair. Not a pretty picture. The amazing thing is, that my body didn’t even mind sleeping on a solid, hard floor. If I tried that now, I probably wouldn’t be able to walk the next day!

So what do I decide to do on the hottest day of the summer so far?? Clean out my studio/office, of course. My husband has been bugging me to rip out the disgusting, once beige, now gray carpet. It took me a long time to work up the courage to go through this process. I have to move everything out. What a job. So I decided if I was going to to do that, I would do a little (major) decluttering along the way. Because frankly, I just have too much crap. But my problem is, especially when it comes to sorting out my books and magazines, it takes me twice as long to do anything because I have to flip through every book/magazine/notebook that I encounter along the way.

What’s this? A journal from 1980 - 82?? Wow, what a trip. Yes, I’ll just have to read a few pages, and a few more, and two hours later I can put it in the grocery bag marked “save.” Actually, I think I should put it in a locked box labeled “Destroy after Karen’s Death,” because I do not want any of my relations looking through that thing!

I bought a book a few years ago called De-cluttering the Feng Shui Way, or something like that. It was very interesting. I didn’t buy all of the philosophy (especially when they started talking about uncluttering your body and the importance of daily, free-flowing bowel movements), but one thing really got me. The book said that all the junk we accumulate is because we live in fear. We fear that if we throw something out, we’re going to need it the next day. BINGO! That’s me to a T. But hey, this happened to me just the other day. I tried to de-clutter that narrow space between the refrigerator and the wall and put all the old accumulated brown paper bags in the recycling bin. Three days later, I needed them to help me de-clutter my office. Isn’t that always the way? I wonder what Feng Shui afficinados would have to say about good old Murphy’s Law?

I’m going to Home Depot to look for some cheap, stick-on vinyl tile for the floor. Now if I could just bring myself to unhook the computer . . .