brushstrokes
Thursday, January 5, 2012 at 7:53AM 
A couple of weeks before Christmas, in anticipation of company coming (and needing to sit somewhere) I started work on a couple of benches I'd been planning for a while. As I painted them, the day before my company came, I thought about the advice I've often read to paint furniture with a paint roller "to avoid brushstrokes". "But," I thought as I painted with a brush, "I like brushstrokes."
Brushstrokes in the paint say to me that my benches were made by someone. Probably someone who could have been doing a million other things at the time, and possibly someone who could have afforded to just go out and buy benches. But what we make, we love, I think, and the things I want in my home with me are things that know they're loved. My benches aren't two in a factory run of ten thousand, checked off by the quality control crew, they're something that, before I pressed them into service in my house, I shaped and held for a few moments. It's as though my creation of them is a blessing I whisper over my little boats before setting them down in the swift current of this household.
As I write here, and as I take photos for this bit of a mental hideaway that you and I share, I find myself choosing the pictures and words that show as little of the seamy side of our lives as possible. I think that's probably natural, since what I want to remember is the successes, the beauty, and let the rough edges fade with time. But I wondered, as I painted my benches, if these things are really anything to be ashamed of. For example, we've lived in our home for a year now, and sometimes my idea of what we "should" have done by now doesn't match up with reality. If I turn the camera just so, you won't see that we still haven't finished that porch ceiling we were talking about a year ago. There are things, so many things, in my home, in my head, in my notebooks, that are marked "unfinished" or "in progress". There are yet other things that I know will stay that way always.
These are the brushstrokes.
Our lives, I realize, are handmade. They don't have a factory sprayed-on finish, and they don't look anything like the pages of Southern Living (although I sigh every month when it arrives in my mailbox). Certainly no one has checked them off of any quality control list. Handmade takes time, and a handmade life, it seems to me, will come together more slowly than a store-bought one. The porch ceiling will get done sooner or later, and that's okay with me. We could pine, I suppose, for some future day when we'll have our house perfect, our selves perfect, everything around us, perfect. Or we could trust that our home, and our lives, know we're working on them, because we love them. And that shows in the brushstrokes.
~MB~
Reader Comments (3)
You are so inspiring Erin. Your thoughts on your "imperfections" help me be a better person. Thanks you.
And thank you for saying so! Thus you, in turn, are inspiring to me.
Lovely, just lovely!