Garden Ornament

This simple ornament in the shape of an icicle was hanging from a piece of string from the plum tree by the steps when we moved here. Who knows how long it hung here before then. We never saw any reason to take it down, or for that matter, thought about it much at all.
I was walking by it the other day and thought, that little ornament has survived a lot and still looks exactly the same as the first time we saw it. Perhaps it is more than just some random tchotchke. Perhaps it is a good luck charm, a reminder that somehow many disasters can be survived....

I confess to being slightly superstitious. I don't know how it got there, but I'm going to leave it just where it is.

I think I have finished my floor polishing project. I haven't done the hall or the guest room but the guest room doesn't get much use, and the hall, though often traveled (sometimes it feels like hundreds of times a day) doesn't get any outdoor light which is most damaging to floors. A lot of high shelves got dusted that probably haven't been dusted in years. Some probably never will be, even though I know they harbor pockets of ash. The highest shelves are a bit like the tree falling in the forest...if nobody sees it does the dust exist? 

Our table full of unwanted electronics is groaning with new additions...a printer, a small television, smoke alarms, and much, much more. How embarrassing that we have amassed this much unwanted stuff in a mere ten years. Thus is the pace of technology these days, but do we always need to keep up? This time around it's all been done in the name of getting rid of clutter.

This all reminds me of a book that came out in 1994 called Material World by Peter Menzel. Sixteen photographers traveled to 30 nations to live for a week with families that are "statistically average" for that nation. At the end of each visit photographer and subjects collaborated on a portrait of the family outside its home, surrounded by all of its material possessions. It is fascinating. I ran across it whilst dusting the library bookshelves and sat down and looked at it again. I think I'll put it out on the table again. It's the illustrated version of my conviction that everybody has a story....