mud pies to medicine: Thank You 8 Year Old Me

Monday, January 23, 2012

Thank You 8 Year Old Me

Sometime in my childhood I decided that skeleton keys were the coolest thing ever. I guess I was born a vintage-savvy hipster. Since I was many years ahead of the trend, I picked them up for pretty cheap from garage sales and flea markets. My parent's friends even gave me their spare skeleton keys belonging to some long lost piece of furniture or trunk. I had quite a collection. And now that vintage is becoming THE decorating trend, skeleton keys are getting more expensive. Gone are the days of spending 10 cents at the flea market to pick up and intricate little design. I recovered my little collection from the deep dark drawers of my childhood desk below essays from the 7th grade and pokemon cars (guilty). As a child I had planned to procure a type set drawer to display them. Sometime around high school and college this idea was lost completely as I traded my sponge painted walls for clean lines and crown molding. And now as a medical student trying to keep both hemispheres of my brain alive, my artistic juices have me crafting and designing and photographing. Now my salvaged keys reside in a type set drawer hanging on the wall in my bathroom. This one below is one of the more typical skeleton keys. They are probably the prettiest but also most common ones.

I found the handkerchief at the antique store. This place picks up estate sales and plops them in the store. That means that unlike a typical little antique store, stuff is EVERYWHERE but it is also less expensive. I had to open drawers in dressers to find the handkerchief below. It felt intrusive even though the owners are long gone. One drawer had neck ties and yarmulkes, another had pictures of the family, and many had handkerchiefs and scarves. Talk about a strange way to get to know someone you'll never meet.

So picture #21 The Key to the Past:

1 comment:

TaraJanuary 23, 2012 at 12:56 PM
One of my favorites so far!
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The inspiration you ask?

I miss making mud pies. There is this huge rock in my front yard. To call it a rock really does it a dishonor. It is a boulder, brought home by my father on a huge dump truck after he blasted it out of a work site. My mom one day told me that even though it is nearly 2.5 feet high, 6 feet long, and 2.5 feet wide, that it was, in fact, only half-showing. The scientist inside of me was disbelieving and set out to get some proof. Clad in a dress, bow in my hair, and my best accessory, a shovel, I trudged outside ready to prove my mother wrong. That is when the digging began. I dug, and dug, and dug, and nearly all 3.5 feet of Danielle fit in that hole when I had reached the bottom of the rock. That became my digging spot, my mud pie kitchen. Each day it was dug, and each evening it was filled back in. Sometimes the holes were small, sometimes they were enormous, and most days the hole was turned into my mud mixing bowl with that rock as my counter. The novelty never wore off. The ebb and flow of my childhood was, in many ways, measured by the ever-changing depth of that hole in the front yard, the hole that never really disappeared even each day after it was filled in. Even though the grass has grown back in that spot, there still remains, an indentation, the scars of a childhood well lived and the disbelieving scientists I have always been.

So, you ask me why I want to be a doctor? I do not want to be a doctor. I want to open a mud pie bakery with the cash register on that rock in my front yard. But, somehow, I doubt I would stay in business long, for the world seems to have lost its taste for mud pies. I guess being a doctor will have to do.