December 24, 2002

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  Occupational therapy

  
  

  This was my worktable yesterday.  The yellow tone is an artifact of the lighting.  The background is stark white butcher paper.  I wish I could show you the true color of the amethysts, but that would require taking them out into the snow, sometime after the sun comes up.  That would defeat my purpose in taking up the work, and would not further the effort to turn that pound of small tumbled stones (the largest is about the size of a dry pinto bean) into pairs of earrings.

  
  

  I’m working on jewelry now because it’s where my heart led me.  Work is what I do when I want to put my mind at ease.  I’ve chosen my various forms of “work” carefully, so that each of my occupations is an activity I enjoy.  At the times when I’m too sick to work, sometimes I play.  I often find the games or puzzles more stressful than work.  It is great, now, being this relatively healthy and energetic.  It took days to get the clutter moved off my worktable, but the effort was worth it.

  
  

  I don’t count how many hours I spend on any project.  Time is not the issue.  I’ve returned several times to the sorting chore, first roughly sorting the big pile into smaller ones of different colors, sizes, shapes, and degrees of clarity.   This job always reminds me of childhood visits to my Uncle Harry in the Kansas State Hospital at Larned.  That was where I first heard of “occupational therapy.”   The staff would pour out big piles of mixed grains and beans on long tables and the patients would sort them into an assortment of containers salvaged from the kitchen.  When a patient would turn in his or her cottage cheese and margarine tubs, the corn, peas and beans would be dumped back into the big tub and mixed for the next batch of patients to sort.  It was a soothing activity for them, as it is for me.

  
  

  Last night, I bagged up what was left of the center pile, the remaining amethysts too small, or too cloudy or just too oddball to meet my standards for jewelry.   Into another bag went the “gravel” pile, the broken pieces, ones that were mostly matrix, and stones of other types that had strayed into the mix before the product got to me.  Now the stones of deepest color and greatest clarity are center stage, and from that pile I’ve already selected about twenty pairs.  Pairing up stones is a matter of looking, focusing, poking and prodding, sliding one stone up next to another to see how the colors match, turning them to see if each has an end or an aspect enough like one on the other stone that when placed in their findings they will match.  It’s like working a big puzzle with no preset solution.

  
  

  I’ve never had a whole pound of amethyst to work with at one time before.   Before the Minas Gerais discoveries turned amethyst from a precious stone to semi-precious, this would have been a treasure trove.  To me, each stage of the process adds value to the stones.  My pile of clear dark stones is worth more to me than the big mixed pile was, and each little box of matched pairs is worth more than the unsorted pile.  Later on, after findings are added and I’ve done the most tiresome chore, hanging the earrings on cards and sticking price tags on, they’ll no longer have value to me at all, and I’ll turn them over to Greyfox for sale.

  
  

  The findings come much later.  When I’m through sorting tumbled amethyst, I have a small bag of citrine crystals, two pounds of celestite crystals, a pound each of tumbled rose quartz, moss agate, aquamarine, garnet, jade….  When I’ve got many matched pairs, then I start adding findings.  For a few winters, I’ve been too ill to do this job on this scale.  Last summer, I made a few earrings from time to time, to restock Greyfox’s stand.  I used up nearly all of the paired stones on hand, so now I’m starting afresh, with a greater variety of stones than ever before.  I love rocks.  Some of you have already seen my rock collection.  Here it is, again:

  
  

  

  
  

  Merry Christmas

  
  

   

  • 3:02 pm
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