See This Vase?

It's nicer in person than it looks in this picture, I promise you. It is sort of irregularly shaped, but deliberately so. The colors are much more vibrant when they aren't under the harsh light of the flash.

However, my taste isn't the point here. This vase is notable for another reason.

You see, a year ago last April (is that how you say that, if I mean April of 2005?) LWC and I went to the Spring Craft Market. It was a carefree Saturday afternoon without the boys. There were a lot of things that were already set in motion at that moment that I didn't know about yet.

First, I was pregnant and didn't know it yet. I would actually find out the Friday following the Saturday of the craft show. I remember being sort of tired walking around at the craft show and I couldn't figure out why that would be. I'd ridden my bike that morning with the usual suspects and I'd gotten dropped, also because I was oddly tired.

Next, I'm sure the round of layoffs at That Place were already in motion as LWC and I walked around looking at lovely crafty wares. This vase was the last frivolous thing I bought while we were still carefree and pre-layoff. I remember staring at it, less than two weeks after we discovered we were going to have Brigid, not knowing what would happen or where we would have to move to. God, I felt dumb for buying it. I remembered LWC and I standing in the booth marveling at how inexpensive their vases and other pottery were for how nice they looked. I think I paid $35 for this one. And yeah, you can't do much with $35, but you can buy some groceries. You can buy enough diapers to last a month with that much money. It was easy to fixate on.

But...it wasn't about the money I spent. It was what the vase represented. It represented a lifestyle where we had no debts (other than the mortgage on the house and the loan on my car, but no credit card stuff) and we had enough disposable income that I bought a rather pointless vase just because I liked it.

It always made me wonder: did everyone who got the axe from that company, no matter which wave they were in, have a thing in their house that represented everything this vase did to me?

I stuck it on the mantel in the old house and tried not to look at it. When I unpacked it here, even with the job and the move straightened out, with new health insurance cards in our wallets and some certainty before our lives got turned upside-down by the B, I still felt uneasy looking at it. It represented something we had that we lost, that we'll never get back. An innocence, really, that things were nice and fun, that we had our friends and nothing would ever change. Friday night gaming would always be. My chair at the table, prime heckling position, would always be.

I saw the picture of the bathroom as it was when we looked at this house, considering if we should buy it, when I made my before/after bathroom wallpaper stripping/painting post awhile ago. The previous owners had a fussy flower arrangement in an equally fussy-looking vase on this goofy shelf type thing in the bathroom when they were showing the house, and I thought our newly repainted bathroom might benefit from the Tom and Kathy version of that. So I rescued my poor, maligned vase from the high, dark shelf where I'd stuck it and carried it upstairs. The blues were similar. The scale was about right.

One trip to the craft store later, and I had some strange-looking beige and brown stuff to put in it. Flowers—too fussy. Weird, curly stuff—just about my speed.

I've been getting used to having it around. The shower is glass, so I can see it while I'm showering. I almost don't even notice it anymore. Someday, I suppose I might not even remember where I got it or what the circumstances were soon after.

But I doubt it.