Handmade Paper
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Fifteen years ago, I traveled to Thailand. It was an amazing trip. I came home with a suitcase stuffed with textiles and layered with large, three feet by four feet, sheets of handmade paper. Eventually, I could not keep the paper stored flat and so I rolled it into a plastic bag and stored it near the back of a closet. I would look at it periodically and think one day I am going to have time, and I am going to make something beautiful with that paper. Perhaps homemade chapbooks. Or broadsides of hand-lettered poems. Or invitations to a beautiful dinner party. Or. Or. Or.
The paper moved with me from Maryland to Florida. It moved about my office as things became crammed here or there and I did not want the paper damaged. I kept thinking, someday, someday. Then I would think of my mother and that stack of cards she had, the correspondence paper unused.
In January, I took scissors to those pieces of paper. I cut them all up. I made Valentine’s Day cards and a stack of correspondence cards, more than a stack, actually, I think there are about 135 cards to write and mail over the next year. They are beautiful as the photo above and below demonstrate.
Pessimistically, the cards represent giving up dreams of someday. Yes, I crafted them into beautiful objects to share with people of whom I am fond, but before the cards, the paper was filled with so many possibilities, so much hope, so many dreams and schemes yet to be achieved. Now they are contained, disciplined, stacked, ready for a utilitarian engagement. That paper is no longer a dream for the future, it is an object in the present.
Ultimately, this reality is why, I think, my mother did not write on her very best stationary. To use it was to concede, this may be the best I can do. This may be the best moment in my life. The future may not hold a better opportunity to use this stationary. As I lost the dreams for the paper as it was cut, glued, and placed into envelopes, I felt that sadness, that sense of resignation to the state of the here and now. I also felt the enormity of the task of writing my through all of the cards. (The Valentine’s Day cards have already been mailed and I assume recycled by the beloved recipients.) Using the paper, transforming it from possibility to an immediate obligation, removed all of the hopes and dreams it came to represent over fifteen years, After completing the craft component of the project, however, in the weeks since, I have come to recognize a new hope that emerges: there may be more handmade paper in my future. I may travel again, make an incredible find, and carefully carry it home.
I would have not known this hope, this sense of possibility, had I not cut into that stash of paper. In the end, I am glad I did.
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