Print Box

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After years of avoiding cleaning the print box, I opted to combine a memory jaunt along with my dust rag. Each item triggered a story:

I picked up my mother's maj jong tile. Each summer, or whenever the new cards came out, my mother and her friends memorized the new hands.

I bought the wood and metal type over a period of five years. A couple had collected antique type for many years, retired and settled in Bernard, Maine. They opened a small store, hung buoys outside, and filled wood boxes with type. All sizes and faces. I remember the man telling me that if I wanted wood Hebrew letters to buy them then because there were few left in the open marketplace. The couple filled shadow boxes with letters and sold empty boxes to customers so that they could wander about and create their own pieces of art. Each summer I visited their store. As time went on the hours became spotty. The man developed hearing problems and his gait wasn't steady. His wife seemed the healthier one. They owned the house across from the store and faced a working harbor. Two years ago the Type store and its boxes of letters disappeared— replaced by a telescope and an astronomer who taught school children to view the stars and planets with both awe and scientific objectivity. "What happened?" I asked. "The woman died and the man moved." And last year the astronomer was gone —replaced by a bookstore. The sea air had already curled the covers of some softbacks.

The Southwest spreads across the print box,—fetishes, Story Tellers, rocks from Hickman's Bridge in Capital Reef, Fairyland Trail at Bryce, the Grand Canyon, Moab, Emerald pool in Zion, and red rocks from forgotten hikes.

I won the yellow convertable in a golf game. The real car went to the person who managed a hole-in-one. My convertible simply meant that my ball landed closest to the hole—in a foursome.

Small boxes display shells and sea glass from Cape Cod's Coast Guard Beach, the Bay of Fundy, and Crane's Beach. A set of bleached white fish teeth balance on a flat end.

On the top shelf an old fashioned perfume bottle contains a drop of salt—all that's left of the poured water of seven friends. We gathered together fifteen years ago to explore spirituality and we each brought water to pour into small containers. Each friend carried home the combined waters of all. In time we all moved in different directions. One became a Unitarian minister, another left a way of life and became a Sufi, another moved away, one found a new partner, one left the group because she felt different, and the other two stayed until the group no longer had a direction.

Hearts fill several boxes.

A locomotive and a caboose fill two boxes, a Christmas gift from a student.

Three rocks from Colorado fill three niches: one is " a small, finger-shaped speciman of fossilized baculite, a squid-like animal that had tentacles. A nearby mesa is named after the baculite whose fossiles are abundant in surrounding areas." I don't know all that. The rocks were given to me with an explanation written on yellow graph paper—"These rocks are from Cretaceous sedimentary strata northeast of Pueblo, Colorado. Ages are about seventy million years." Both rocks were hand polished, a gift.

The Fine Art of Collecting

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It's really about collecting. It started when I went for a walk on the Wonderland Trail just south of Southwest Harbor, Maine. In less than a mile and to the left of the path, a woman's body appeared on a tree trunk—not her contour, but a dimensional body of bark and branches. That was my first tree photo.

It's really about collecting. Some of us are hard wired to be collectors. Have two of something and you envision a collection. Four bulletin boards of buttons flank a hallway in my house. There's every type of button from Bring the Washingtons Back to Washington showing George and Martha in tones of brown to a recent button prodding voters with this slogan Had Enough! Vote Democrat.

Years ago a friend with the same propensity for collecting gave me a list , compiled by a connosieur, of one hundred must read mystery and detective novels. We set out on a quest to acquire these books. All real quests carry the burden of rules. Our rule—only copies from yard sales, library sales or used book stores. I recall finding the Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan under a stack of National Geographics. I opened the book to this line, "It happened many years ago in Senegal. I was quartered in a remote station, and to pass the time used to go fishing for big barbel in the river." We never did find all one hundred books, but I did read some fascinating sagas.

My collections of Dixie cup covers, magnetic small dogs, Mexican jumping beans, and unicorns faded. The unicorns gave way to Bastet the Egyptian cat and Ganesh the elephant headed Hindu deity.

Imagine my delight when I found a photo scavenger hunt on the web. To participate you shoot twenty-six photos that describe a given list of twenty-six words. I'm off and running. This photo fits in my collection of trees, but it also will be the photo I use for in the sky . I have a photo for light, blur, travel and newborn. Twenty-One more photos to go! Then I'll place all twenty-six photos in a small album and add it to the scavenger hunt album I completed in November. That's the start of another collection!