LETTERS FROM HOME: TISSUE PAPER ANGELS AND KITCHEN TABLE TREASURES

Nov. 18, 1999

Dear Pat,

Thousands of people will come to Cape Girardeau this weekend to shop for unique Christmas presents. Huge arts and crafts fairs will be thrumming at five different locations. The goods will range from the sublime to creations with stranger muses."Gosh," you say. "This is so one of a kind." And maybe it isn't even quite that, was manufactured by the hundreds or thousands, like kitchen-table Chryslers. But any act of creation is a movement of the soul. Children finger paint for the joy of the mess, adults turn Kleenex into angels for the way it makes them feel. When you lose yourself in the act of creation you identify with a larger whole -- Creation itself.

In the house of my childhood hung a framed image of a doe and a fawn my mother embroidered when she was young. It might not belong in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In fact, I always thought the doe looked a bit like a rabbit. But when my brother asked her for the picture recently, I knew how he felt. It's not the fawn. It's the fondness.

DC is putting some of her pottery into an art sale at the university. She says she just wants to get rid of some of the vessels that have been accumulating for the past year but I suspect she interested in seeing whether people actually will buy one of her creations. That is the validation all of us secretly value most, that someone would pay for what we do -- not matter how little or how much. Each platter and bowl is priceless to me.

Two-thirds of the way through fall, the transition between the seasons is signified hereabouts by the sight of deer riding on truck bumpers and the raking of leaves it is too dry to burn. A drought that stretches far back into summer has made a fire hazard of the entire region.

The temperature has been warmer than normal, yielding the feeling of a free ride into December. No such thing. A huge branch broke off in a wind storm and kOed part of our chimney, and the roof has developed a leak that is snowing plaster from the living room ceiling. The tree-trimming man and the roof-fixing company are on their way.

For DC, this time of year usually brings on a new household project. She wants me to disappear for a weekend so she can sand the floors. Hank and Lucy will go mad. I will go elsewhere, perhaps to a more Southern latitude where the Bermuda grass is still green. But I quake to think of the household I might return to once the dust settles.

Oh well, havoc is creative, too.

If people go to the arts and crafts fairs this weekend searching for treasure they will find it. It will be there among the bric-a-brac, some object conceived with love and made with honesty and grace. They will recognize its essence. The French language has a word, disponible, that describes the state of being emotionally available, open, willing to be moved. That is the basic requirement of all art and all that's required to find the beauty in the humblest creations. Love, SamSam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.