When strolling past the seemingly endless vendors at our local flea market, one often hears the familiar of call of someone saying "everything on this table is just one dollar!". This works in drawing people into their booth, because people buy a lot of junk simply because it is just one dollar (which explains the popularity of dollar stores). It was when I was looking at one particular "dollar box" that I spotted it. Amongst the usual array of tacky coffee cups, discarded paperbacks, and well-loved stuffed animals, sat this small and very antique looking rug. It had clearly seen better days, but had a beautiful rose pattern on it. I immediately saw myself cutting it up to make some cool fabric cuffs and using the many yards of antique lace and buttons I've collected to embellish it. Feeling that flea market shoppers "high" (if you are a flea market junkie, you know what I'm talking about), I went to pay the guy a dollar for this cool find. As I was handing him my dollar, the guy says to me "this is an old prayer rug, probably from the civil war". I really wish he hadn't have told me that because now comes the dilemma I often face of "is this too precious/valuable/historical to alter?". So then the rug sat in a corner of my art room, lonely and forgotten. Every once and while I picked it up to ponder what this guy told me. Was this really a civil war prayer rug? For all I know the guy could have been full of baloney, but it did look very old. I could picture some civil war woman praying on it for the safe return of her husband, son, father, or brother. The internal debate continued as I pondered the condition of the rug. The edging was irreparably damaged in places and it had several burn marks and stains. I pictured being on some show like "Pawn Stars" and having the guy tell me my rug would be worth much more if it was in perfect shape.
It was around the time my grandmother became ill and went into hospice care that the sewing scissors finally came out. As I read the many e-mails from California about how she expressed to people she was ready to go on and how her body kept holding on despite her wishes, that I impulsively starting cutting away and that rug and never looked back. Things (and people) sometimes just need the chance to be let go of, so they can be reborn into something new, and the journey can continue. So did I destroy a valuable historical artifact? I suppose it is possible, but I have no regrets, just this cool new cuff bracelet. The theme of the bracelet is "drifting around the world", because grandma liked to travel to exotic new places (and she still is).
