a hammer and a nail.
Someone needs to take my hammer and nails away from me. It feels like I am turning my apartment into a modern temple of everything that inspires me. On Thanksgiving weekend, I moved the living room around. Now, the couch rests in a little alcove that leans over the street. A patchwork bedspread from India covers the back of the couch, and white lights trace fireflies above it. In the keyhole archway over the couch, I've erected a shrine to Santa Frida, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and Dia de los Muertos.

This is where the hammering is a problem. The narrow, but efficient wall in said keyhole archway is covered with punched tin milagros, painted nichos, and odd little trinkets (like the spiked ornament with a Chinese water deer on it). Every time I leave my house, I'm returning with items to nail to my walls. Over the television is an oil painting of Coatlicue, one of my heroines. With her wicked, slitted stare and a beating heart in hand, she reminds me of Kali of Hindu lore. A weather goddess with a skirt of ravens (one of my pieces) lifts above a skeleton linocut representation of the element Holmium. Masks from trips to Aruba, Guatemala, and Bali stare and smile near the coat closet. A homemade shadowbox culled from many desert wanderings and lovingly put together with my hands is over the desk.

This is just the living room. I cannot be trusted with a hammer. Sometimes, when I'm lying on the couch, listening to the grunt of the cars and buses below, I look at the walls and feel like a nesting bird. Everything has a place. However, if a stranger stepped into my house, she might think that nothing matched or that everything matched in the strangest of ways. She might wonder about a mind that thinks Picasso's "Old Man with Guitar" and its melancholy blues belong feet away from vivid tapestry pillows from Indonesia and a coffee table that's really an exotic painted trunk. I also have over a thousand pounds of books. Really.

My Everlast boxing gloves dangle inches from a Hopi handmade basket, a few feet from the eagle feathers tied in a bundle and the Chinese leather director's chair. Buddha statues curl their fingers into the lotus position, next to fertility statues from Kenya and bones from my desert walks. An ancient tear-bottle from Jerusalem (over 2,000 years old) is perfectly at home near a paper lion and hand-wicked candles of cardamom and orange. I hammer more nails into the wall, playing zydeco and Mexican mariachi music, indie rock and y'alternative, Baroque and punk from the late '70s.

The walls are covered, but I'm still missing pieces of my collection. I have a few more nails, an old hammer, and the eye of a museum curator. One of the reason I love Shaun--and there are many--is that he tolerates my hammering and never says anything negative about my need to feather my nest and surround myself with creature comforts. He accepts and smiles, and causes me to be much more accepting of myself than I ever have been before.

jewel-bird