Yesterday I explained my love for William Carlos Williams' The Red Wheelbarrow and how it reminds me is to look for the little things that bring me joy or have great beauty...so are you ready to find out what's in the redwheelbarrow that makes me happy today everyone?
Let's have a look...
Oh my, today in the redwheelbarrow there's a framed copy of Judie Tzuke's I Am The Phoenix!
I have this framed LP on the wall in my workroom (otherwise known as Tempest's Laboratory, not quite as cool as Dexter's...I aspire to sliding metal walls and some toxic warning signs, but it's where I make all my costumes and props).
This LP is a little piece of amazing and loaded with meaning for me.
In May 1987 I bought this LP for my boyfriend...now my gorgeous husband. He'd lost his original so I was so pleased with myself when I found a second-hand copy in our local record shop (check your history books, once upon a time people bought large black round vinyl things in shops that you had to leave your house to visit....yes, really).
The record itself was scratch free but the sleeve was a little battered around the edges. I did a miraculous job straightening bent edges and touching it up for hours with a black felt tip pen until it looked as good as new. And he loved it :)
Many, many years later when I was recovering from a long deep depression (see more about my cyclothymia here), we took the LP out of the record cabinet, framed it and hung it up in our dining room back in Shropshire, England.
The record meant a lot to us, it reminded us of our love for one another and as I'd recently being diagnosed as cyclothymic, it came to represent me too - I'm always going to have times when I crash and burn, but just like a phoenix, I will always come back, I will find my way out of the tunnel back into the sunshine, and then I'll burn brightly again (before I burn out, and the cycle will start again).
Seeing the LP on the wall made me smile. It reminded me that it will be sunny one day no matter how dark the clouds that currently surrounded me.
Then freakily my husband was asked by his company if he would come and work in the USA for a couple of years...to Phoenix, Arizona!
And here we are. We upped sticks from sleepy rural Shropshire and moved to Phoenix for our latest adventure. We started anew, again...and we brought Judie's album and stuck up on the wall, and it made us smile.
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