I found this quote over on Joanne's blog -
"You have to save yourself--little by little-- day by day. Build yourself a home. Nurture your body. Find something to work on. Something that makes you excited. Something you want to learn. Charlotte Ericksson."
This resonated with me. This is what I feel like I have been doing since I left Fred Hutch, and especially since the kids moved out, the dogs passed away and we cut down our tree. This feels like my path right now. Maybe I need a tad more more that "little by little".
My neighbor/friend who drags me out of the house on occasion took me to Cacadia Art Museum to an art exhibit by Maria Frank Abrams. It always boggles my mind when I read "Holocaust survivor". I always think, how can someone physically or emotionally be a survivor of such a horrible event. Thankfully, they are not as weak-kneed as I am.
Born in 1924, Abrams grew up in Debrecen, Hungary, in a well-to-do family. A Jew, she was just 20 and already an artist when she and her family and more than two million others were taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland in 1944. She was later taken to Bergen-Belsen, a death camp in Germany, and later another internment camp in the country. Her parents and all of her extended family were killed. Only she and one cousin survived. When the death camp at Magdeburg was liberated by the Allies, Marika weighed only 68 pounds.
Three years after her release from the camps, she found her way to Seattle on a Hillel scholarship to study art at the University of Washington. At the UW, she studied under renowned artists such as Walter Isaacs and Tobey and those associated with the growing modernist art movement. It set her on the path to her own unique style. Her work later expanded to mosaics and public art pieces. She also designed costumes and sets for the Seattle Opera.
While many argued that her time in the concentration camps was the impetus for her often dark work, it was Abrams herself who said it was the subtle, ever-changing hues of the light over Lake Washington that inspired her.
She said many times over the years that she did not paint about the Holocaust. Abrams lived on Mercer Island since the mid-1950s at a home with a large, light-filled studio facing Lake Washington near West Mercer Elementary School. She leaves behind her husband of 64 years, Sydney; their son, Edward, and his wife Tali; two grandchildren, Omri and Noga Vilma; and her cousin, Vera Federman, of Mercer Island, Agnes Jacobson of Santa Barbara, and Lewis Rose of Sydney, Australia.
Then Meagan took me to some galleries and antique stores. She is always shocked that I don't know about some of the new stores in Edmonds. I definitely have not shopped much in Edmonds (small, walkable town with a round-about) in the last 2.5 years, but I guess I really quit shopping down there quite a few years ago. Probably when I felt like I didn't "need" anything. I do go to the HomeWares on shop locally day to buy up candles for Christmas presents. But other than that, I am really ignorant of new avenues to spend money here. So I did shop a little yesterday. I bought a rather large felted brooch at the Museum shop.
For some reason, I bought a few antique Catholic medals at The Curious Nest. I am NOT Catholic or very religious but I do have a fascinated with religious medals. The one that I had to have a small, much-loved, very worn Sacred Heart Medal. I could imagine someone devotedly rubbing that image at church or in time of need and comfort. "The Sacred Heart is one of the deepest religious devotions to Jesus' physical heart as the representation of His divine love for humanity."
When mom converted to Catholicism and went through her confirmation, I gave her a charm bracelet full of religious medals. It is rather heavy and expensive at the time, but I do love it so. I find myself going through Ebay listings of "vintage religious medals" maybe too often. I always wondered why mom converted but I think now her guilt over Susan was too much and this might be the reason.
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