I remember the first time I found out that most people didn’t have photo albums full of dead people. I was in grade eight and I brought my new friend Connie home for a visit. We were looking through photo albums when she pointed out that it was weird to have so many, well for that matter, any (!) photos of people dead in their caskets.

Well who knew?

So, this is one of my latest collages, a sort of homage to my mother and her mother and the whole Mennonite mom motif.

It reminds me that I come from strong stock. Women who stared at Death with clear-eyes, kneaded bread into submission with strong arms, and scrubbed clothes and kids until their knuckles were raw.

To this day, bleach is one of my favourite smells. I really grew up with a strong sense of clean. Mom often said, they may have been poor but that didn’t mean you couldn’t be clean. Our scrubbed-up house was testament to that obsession.

I know for a fact that I was the only kid on our street that had to scrub the outside of the house, starting at the gutters and working my way down the pink and yellow rough-cedar siding.

So this collage is in honour of that little blonde-haired five-year old who would grow up to be my mom. She is standing with some of her siblings. The five-day old new twins aren’t in the photo. This is probably at their home in Osler or Warman, Saskatchewan. Not sure, maybe my aunt will tell me.

But for now, this is what I have; an old photo, a bird’s wing that I found in our back yard, a rusty hinge from the old outhouse building that we now use for our push mower storage, a little bit of wasp paper that floated down from the skies, a prairie wheat stalk, a smashed saucer with Mother in gold script & a rusty spoon that I found while digging. All of it is set on a background of old fashioned wallpaper.

Everything to me is about the ephemeral nature of life. Broken, oxidized, decaying and torn from its original manifestation and more beautiful because of its very brokenness.