People Are Solid Gold

I have some very glittery friends and family. 

Each of them is their own snow globe. I can’t pick out just one scene that stands still inside of them, or, an even harder choice, just one song that is played when the tiny golden knob on the bottom is twisted. 

The globes all look undeniably cozy, sitting there in a cubby, holding memorable scenes inside their small set designs. Each of them looks ready for a good shake up, just to see where the glitter falls.

All of the “Remember the time so-and-so did this, and so-and-so did that!’s” caught in a glass globed body of nostalgic, distilled water:

The lost bus we hot-wired down by the dirt red lake. The room we thought we locked ourselves out of. The trophies of making shit funny. Those meals and drinks we can’t help but order when we go to our favorite spots. 

The worn decks of cards. The books borrowed. The donut briberies. The really fun bad ideas. 

The scars shaped like countries on our bodies. The forest scrapes. The karaoke and cannonballs. The manifesting of  fat tips. The hopped over waves that could’ve crushed us. The times we were over that place, so we went to Target, and then to bed early. 

The well-crafted parody songs that came out naturally on a nice, long car ride.

The great grasshopper ambush of 2005 that sold us out when we were sneaking on that car lot. The thank-god-there-were-no-cameras-like-this-back-then moments. The camping in the rain looking like a real Van Gogh painting in the pink rocks of South Dakota. 

The wedding where I only knew you. 

The blue jean baby curtain call with Elton in a robe on the keys. The whiskey shots with virtual chess matches. The arm punch after finding the lost ring in the Prague cemetery.

The forfeiting of the last slice of pie— 

“You take it.”

“No you.

“No you.”

“Fine, I’ll take it. But I’m not happy about it.” A staple Midwestern dilemma.

The dance classes we were humbled by, and all the times we sang Queen.

Truly, my sentimental muscles are all legs that could run laps around the next guy.

But these scenes are all tiny decorations on tiny tables and tiny shelves in the sparkling snow globes, and all the nicknames we’ve had are plastered to the walls like framed artwork.

Maybe these snow globes of people, and the events we shared with them, represent both the comfort of the daily we can hold on to, and also the way the glitter of the novelty can mix us all up, and fall on just the right objects that need to be touched at the time when we need that memory of resilience, or a good crying laugh, the most. 

Glitter landing on the edge of a tiny picture frame holding a photo of the 7-hour move catalyst featuring a car filled to the brim with everything: snacks, old flour we were going to do some baking with, candles almost burnt down to the end, and every shred of paper, washed bone, found feather, journal, notebook, text book, and a fiddle leaf fig tree just getting its first leaves. All of it camped out in the middle of Kansas on a short journey South with gas station pizza, and not knowing what will come in the next months or years.

What felt like a life knocked out by flames, and the days ashed, was really just glitter getting tossed up like a devilish reminder that we truly have zero control in this world, yet, we made it through this and that even when our eyes couldn’t see through the snow. It’s a very pretty tiny picture in a snow globe now. A reminder of things we can do.

The knobs on the bottoms of the globes when twisted play songs we sang in the car, songs we danced to, and laughs that those amazing humans fully own, and that mine irresistibly begins to morph into when I am around them— especially that one friend that is absolutely contagiously affecting the walls of my home with crackling laughter like static, and I hope those walls hold onto it and get stained up good and forever. 

Or, the other good human who makes heads turn with that laugh that is so different it announces itself to everyone in a room. A laugh that is a true signal of someone who has more good life in their body than they can hold onto by themselves, and they don’t care who knows it, or grabs a handful. That laugh that is sharing, foaming off the top of their frosty, cold beer glass. 

I name my jewelry after people. The closest ones, the ones I wish I knew, and those people that blew into my life one day with too many good things to say, or things that made me laugh too hard to forget.

”You’re not your first thought. What you are is your second, and what you do with that first thought.”

“People are solid gold.”

”I always pack three extra pairs of underwear in case I shit myself three times on a trip.”

The people in my life are all big statements that I want to carry around with me, and that’s exactly how the jewelry pieces get their names. A pair of earrings named after a friend who misses the flowers and plants around her home in Thailand, is a reminder that both the real and imagined pieces of Thailand are mesmerizing, and the lemongrass broth she made with the octopus popping on the skillet is just as equally mesmerizing. The necklace named after the friend who still doesn’t have their ears pierced, who wears the purple wedding dress, and that one time made me laugh into stomach cramps as she heckled a cliff jumper into safely taking the plunge to meet his friends in the water from across a small canyon, gathering a crowd of laughing hikers that watched to see if he would do it.

He didn’t.

These fragments of stories probably don’t mean much to you, because you’ve got your own with your own people. But I do hope that looking at the funky colors on a pair of earrings like “The Poppy Seeds” reminds you of someone playful, or “The Maleena Boots” reminds you of the kid that might travel the whole world when she can. The jewelry is meant to be personified, and if nothing else, a statement piece that maybe one day you will pick up and remember all the good times you had in them.

The Dot, Dot, Dot

I had a friend tell me once that questions that start with “what” are really safety masks for questions that begin with “why.”

‘What are you doing?’ oftentimes is a question that is really asking “Why are you doing that?” or, “Why do you do it this way?” I think about this thought from a friend sometimes, but not often enough. Sometimes asking myself “What am I doing?” Is really an easier, if not more panic-ridden question then “Why are you doing this?” Sometimes it’s safer to remain in the static energy of panic, than it is to wonder about all the “why’s” with a fat mug of steaming coffee and awkward silences with myself. I wonder if other people can relate to this feeling too. The “what” questions seem quicker to answer, like ripping off band aids for the busy-bodied people. Just cauterize the wound already, am I right?

The “why” questions feel like drawing blood, putting a slide of it under a microscope, and really figuring out why something is in you. This comes at the cost of there being no end, a scary ellipsis of inconclusive results, and a rapidly growing spider web of whys.

What am I doing? That’s easy. I’m making little, mostly and hopefully pretty, ceramic things with my hands.

Why am I doing it? I like to tell stories. I like to preserve and collect stories.

I had a teacher who told me to keep a list of things I wanted to do in my life in my wallet. When I finished something, she told me to make a new list, filter it and see what I wanted to keep, and take out what wasn’t for me anymore. 

“Then put it back in your wallet, and look at it every once in a while,” she said, swinging her feet off her desk. I loved her because even when she was teaching, she felt so wrapped up in her own story. What a world hers must be to live in, I often thought. Who cares about this class? How did I take a little bit of her with me?

Ten years ago, I wrote a list that looked like it was afraid of asking for what it wanted. The list basically shook itself without my help, it read so scared. It looked like I had already decided that I would take the crumbs to my own goals. What is kind of funny now, is seeing how each crumb on that list was actually an ambiguous map on my toast plate.

Pottery, coffee shops, maybe a book, travel led me to friends, stories, a craft that hotwires both sides of my brain together, and happy triggers— the lesser talked about of the triggers.

I make tiny, pretty, warm things because I want to keep the stories on me, in the rooms I live in, the places I go to be a part of…and I want to keep adding to their ceramic stories. I desire each piece to feel like a long ellipsis— a dot, dot, dot— that people can collect stories with.

But who can say? Sometimes, when you get to the bottom of a “why,” you realize at the deepest depth of the well, you just like doing something. There might not be anything stronger than that. Maybe you just like wearing something. Who can say.