Reflections in Glass

Sometimes I get itchy fingers (like itchy feet but with less expensive consequences!)  I need to make or create or do something tactile.  Sometimes it is because life can get a bit routine – work, cooking, cleaning, driving, mowing the lawn –all good in their own way, can seem a bit mundane at times.

We have a Wendy House in the garden – home to cutters, rakes, brooms, garden chairs – that sort of thing.  It is as old as our title deed and rather weathered.  Quaintly, a stubborn rose plant is growing up a side, through the house and poking some branches out the front. (No rose flowers in all the twenty years, but such determination I can’t cut away.  Besides it looks rustic.)  Parts of the shed are actually rotten – the wood needs replacing. And don’t look too carefully if you don’t want to see the little beetle holes.  It is a ramshackle shed.

A few years ago we screwed the windows shut after I found someone in the garden trying to get into the Wendy House.  What he wanted I will never know, because we both startled each other and he ran off.  So the windows no longer open, and the door is symbolically rotten.

What better place to put a stained glass window.

I love cutting glass and playing with the way light falls, reflects and gets absorbed by colours. So, that is my latest project and it gives me a lot of satisfaction.

And of course, time to think.  Sometimes those of us who feel that we are more than the sum of the functions we do, need a little sparkle added to our lives.  I am very conscious of the many comparisons that I can make between my Wendy House and my Wendy Self, what with some rotten bits, quaintly ramshackle and don’t even get me started on the whole intruder- in- the- garden- and- window scenario!  So spending some time on adding a completely unnecessary but creatively fun window into the Wendy Shed/Soul turned out to be not so unnecessary after all.  I needed to add a personal touch to a neglected space.

Parenting is hard work.  We all have challenges to face . Sometimes the challenges are  immediate or more intense than at other times.  Sometimes it is the long term just coping with everything that is thrown at us that seeps away the energy.  I love being a parent.  I love the creativity, problem solving, all consuming attention it requires.  I even love the difficult bits, the sleepness nights, the routine of it.  Because all of it, like the pieces of glass in a stained glass window, create a whole picture from fractured bits and pieces.  I added a few mirror pieces in the window too, just to remind myself to put some self reflection in the mix. 

The window has turned my ramshackle shed into an Eclectic Garden Storage Unit.  Nah not really. It is just my Wendy House.