I took the screen off the window and shooed the fly outside, then quickly put the screen back in before the fly comes back.
I had no idea that the fly doesn’t want to be outside. She didn’t mistakenly fly into the house from outside she, like me, lives in the house.
We’re room mates.
And there are a whole bunch of other insects that we’re sharing our old farmhouse with that feel they have as much a right to be there as we do. Some of them are probably species that haven’t even been named by humans yet.
And they’re not just in our house, they’re in your home too. Not necessarily the same ones, but there are insects living in every house or apartment whether it’s old or new, in the country, suburbs or city.
Honestly, it’s not something I ever though much about, until reading Rob Dunn’s book “Never Home Alone”.
Now I’m thinking small, so small it’s huge, universal really. Because Dunn also gets into microbes and how we share not only our homes with them, but our bodies too.
Knowing this has definitely affected my thinking.
For instance, when Fate and I took a walk in this woods this morning I was thinking of all the good microbes I was getting just from being in the presence of all that nature. Apparently we don’t really know specifically what all the different microbes do, (we tend to only study the harmful ones) but like most things the balance between the good and bad microbes is important to our health.
And all of this small talk got me thinking about my Tiny Flower potholder. I made this potholder using the smallest hand-embroidered flower from a vintage hankie. It’s so small I had to use my macro lens to get a picture of it.
The lens makes it look like a giant flower sewn on blue burlap, but it’s really the most delicate thing, hand-stitched on a whisper of blue cotton.
Dunn’s book brings to light all those wonders right in our own home, the small beings that often get over looked or are misunderstood.
For years I didn’t know how to use the tiny embroideries on the hankies that people sent me.
I wanted to present them in a way that would make us attention to them again. To appreciate the work that one woman did to bring beauty into her life in the form of a tiny flower on the corner of a hankie. And to understand the true size of that seemingly tiny gesture.
My potholders always seem to come to the rescue. Purposeful and pretty, they can enhance our lives visually and be practical at the same time.
I like being able to find a place and give a name to those small and forgotten things in life.
The normal flora present on your skin and in your body is mind blowing. To say nothing of the little dudes that share your space. I think this is a book I would like to read. I remember in school, we had to take a sterile piece of gauze and swipe the counter top of the kitchen and then plant it so it would grow. It was really cool. I like your idea of relating your art to tiny things that we sometimes don’t see or attach much importance to.