I have no idea what it says about me that I love stuff like this so much. Okay…maybe I do know what it says about me: that I’m an OCD-ridden freak who enjoys living in the illusion that life will be perfect once everything is neatly organized.
Still, I think this stuff is pretty cool: re-purposing common household items. My favorite is the repurposed CD case.
About the time I was writing my first book, I asked my mom for a picture of herself. She had become a character in my novel and I wanted something to dream on, an idea of her at another part of her life.
What she sent me was amazing: a picture of herself at 23 holding me at less than a year. She was gorgeous – I never think of my mother as gorgeous – and that was only one wild thing about the image.
I was in my mid thirties at the time and I had just started teaching college courses, and I realized that if I had met her on the street or in a classroom, I would have treated her like a child. At 23, she was a child. I wouldn’t have asked her on a date, and I wouldn’t have done anything but try to ease her way through the world. I would have had to stifle the desire – as I often do with my own preciously young students – to call her “sweetheart.” And yet there I was, in her skinny arms, less than a year out of the womb.
This was a really complicated moment, looking at that picture, full of tenderness and forgiveness and just straight up wonder at the way we walk through the world without ever for one second suspecting who we are. Here’s my own mother as a child and there I am, completely in her care. How do you explain something like that?