Two weekends ago (13th-14th – it’s taken me a while to get to this blog) was our anniversary, my birthday, and mother’s day.
We went to Timpanogas cave to hike through it and then realized from what the lodge guide told us that we didn’t want to take Mago through those near-freezing temperatures, so we took a different hike for maybe a third of a mile before we were exhausted and hot.
Last weekend with my birthday money, I scavenged in a bead store (Born Again Beads in the University Mall, Orem) for the beads I love most, and a charm (they corrected me when I called it a pendant), and made two necklaces for me and Tia, and a bracelet for me – these are pictured here
The main beads in my necklace are yellow turquoise, copper, and metal-plated (don’t know what) plastic, framed with lapis lazuli and olive jade, on a metal wire, with a sailboat charm.
Tia’s necklace is of many ocean jasper beads (which is ocean creatures and/or coral fossilized in quartz), and the same copper beads as mine, between smaller Botswana agate (eye agate) beads, on a metal wire. The first time I made it she loved it and wanted changes (out with the yellow beads it had), and we collaborated on a redesign that I love more. Also I added a silver fish-hook clasp to it.
If you can’t see the picture, the metal beads in mine have watery-misty streak engravings, and the copper beads have a.. cool.. how to describe.. kinda brutal, geometric (circles and triangles) intricate pattern cut out of the columnar bead so you can see through the openings to the other side.
My bracelet is of moss agate, obsidian, and ocean jasper, with a sterling silver clasp – and I made it this weekend, not last.
The blue and gold beads in my necklace are our high school colors (Orem High). The sailboat has many meanings for me (the following three paragraphs).
My mother’s father was a boatman and fisherman (not by profession), lived on the U.S. western seaboard (Pacific Northwest), and he recently died, which in pagan Irish mythology is identified with sailing or going into the unknown west, and there’s a tradition of Irish blood in his ancestors (yada yada YADA, I keep remembering a feeling I should do genealogical research there). I remember enjoying boat trips with him.
Thinking in scriptural types, Nephi, in the Book of Mormon, built a boat to sail across the ocean to his Promised Land, and I need an education (which I have avoided most of my life) to get my family to our own promised land; to me education is a boat. To get that education, I need the disciplined hard work ethic which my grandfather had. And my fooling myself that idleness is a better life needs to sail into the west and die.
On top of all that, the bead store clerk, looking at the boat charm on my finished necklace, mentioned a book she recommended to her children at their graduations (hello, the education theme! – and I hadn’t told her my meanings for picking a boat), in which a captain of large steam and power boats who lives in the Pacific Northwest (where my grandfather lived!) related: when he was a boy he was at the docks and told a dock worker, pointing to a very large boat, that he wanted to operate it. The worker told him to start with a small row-boat. Start small. That applies to me – I’m grandiose and want everything now or I won’t have any of it. Well, I’ve gotta say, where I’m at, I’m starting small.