How Do You Begin

to Show Enough Reverence

I have this green Tupperware full of bird cards. Originally collected from tins of tea by my mother’s mother, given to me when I was a child and held safely by mum until a few years ago. She came to see the house we moved to a bit out of town, the kids showed her their bedrooms and she pushed them both on the swings in the backyard.

It’s a big deal for mum to travel, and at that time she’d lived three hours drive away. She handed me some ephemera - a coffee cup I’d bought her in Liverpool, a handkerchief from Thailand, a blue suitcase of Nanna’s that now houses my many craft projects not in progress and these cards. Downsizing happens a lot when people age. This beloved little old lady who marked the notion of home for me in my beginnings visited my home, carrying these items and a hunger to see my adult life safely housed. To see me parent from her final boss form as Nanna.

Earlier that day I’d met up with some friends for ice-cream, they’d come up from Naarm for a session at Forest Creek Tattoo and we sat in the shade catching up and enjoying easy chats. When we parted ways, I crossed the road to go back to my car in time for school and kinder pickup. Pausing in the middle of the road to let a car through, I smiled and waved in response to the people inside the car doing the same.

Just before they arrived at my place an hour later, I twigged that the people in the car were my sister and mum. Delayed processing and fatigue wreaks havoc with my mind and framing of everywhen, but to not recognise my own mother was very confronting. There are so many moments that I feel frail and so many that I feel strong. The connection between them is grief, a rope bridge I can’t physically cross over an image of a ravine, but my mind and heart believe I can, enough to stubbornly make it through many situations.

How my heart leapt to hold these bird cards! Every cell in my body was flooded with joy and love, play and presence. I was a child playing with the dolls house, the well-thumbed items that filled it. Tiny beds and figures and hours of imagination. The bird cards in a teetering pile, soft cardboard I was careful never to crease, secured together with a sparkly hair tie that had a hard tube of silver metal joining the fraying ends. They were soft just like I remembered, smelling ever so faintly of tealeaves. Wonder at the colours and how each image suggests recent movement - landing on a branch or preparing to soar away. The flowers and foliage delicately reproduced in these detailed moments.

I’ve had the green container in my office for a few years now. Every now and then I ask people how I should display them, if they have any ideas. It feels awful to keep them locked in the box. I want to protect them from harsh light, mindful that they could fade. Laminating them feels like a violent form of suffocation. This morning in conversation with a group of people two suggestions floated to the surface that made the most sense.

To embroider a border around some fabric I could attach them to somehow, a weave that will breathe. The border could be the trees and foliage the birds prefer, and I’d scan the backs of the cards to preserve the information about each species and the font used and the lovely words used to convey their personalities and origins.

And the second was to hang them like a curtain you can walk through, so you can see the backs and the fronts and also feel them on your face. Enacting flight of these rectangles of card and ink and dye and flora and fauna. I imagine finding an exquisite fallen branch and threading the cards with unbreakable nylon. I made something like this for Mrs Peach when we were starting IVF, asking our loved ones for words of encouragement for her and printing them on shimmery silver blue paper I cut out like clouds, attached to different lengths of vintage embroidered ribbon, then hung on a pink velvet coathanger from our bedroom ceiling. I loved gathering all that care together with my hands and presenting it to my darling.

But the birds - for either option I’d need to pierce the cardboard or stick them in some way, affixing them to something, and it just feels wrong. It doesn’t feel like imagination and presence and love and freedom. It doesn’t feel like being wrapped in my Nanna’s arms and knowing how completely I was loved, if I keep them in the box or if I damage them in some way. This box of bird cards is a token of that affection and a clue about the storytelling that flows between generations.

Taking a walk with a friend the other day, I knew the names of some trees they were wondering about. That knowledge was in me to remember, passed down from my matrilineal line. I think I mention names of birds and plants to my children too, absentmindedly like the way I say “tin past tin” when passing an identical car to the one I’m driving, or “I can see the sea” when the ocean comes into view.

These cards remind me of being loved and having knowledge passed along, of imagination and play and presence. To house them must invoke similar feelings - and that’s definitely not a plastic box.

I’m making maps at the moment that represent different phases of life and using different mediums to reflect and capture a feeling. They’re a bit like this meme:

And this diagram

And this question

And this game

The maps are a way, once again, of getting the story out of my body and onto the page. If I can regard them from a different perspective perhaps I can understand. Perhaps I will never understand, and just make things in response to memory.

I’d love any suggestions you have for the bird cards that won’t suffocate them, pierce them or involve anything sticky touching them. I want them to fly and I want to hold them and never let go.

All my love, JP