38 Vases

Last week when I adopted a broken vase, I finally had to admit I am a vase addict. You’d think I had this large, multi-roomed house with a dining room table, sitting rooms, a verandah, myriad places and surfaces on which to display luscious clusters of flowers. All of that is a “no”; I do, however, have 38 vases in my living room.

I used to think the people I know who collect thimbles or kerosene lamps were a little balmy since they never even used them. Bobbi’s thimbles are mounted in boxes and hung on the wall; Brad’s lamps are spotlessly free of kerosene and the wicks are not encrusted with the black residue of burning.
Vases are useful. One needs them. Actually, I think they are so necessary to the living of a life that they have been my present of choice—for newlyweds or third-time weds, for high school graduates striking off to college. Everyone needs something beautiful in which to put the flowers that will surely come their way.

But the truth is my vases are rarely used. Except for the one in which I may have flowers and a large raku vase that always sits on the floor and holds walking sticks, they are all usually jammed together on the top of a large yellow pine cabinet in a corner by the east window.

The morning light strikes them first thing each day: yellow and orange, white, green, and a surprising number are blue—not my favorite color. There’s the one of thick cobalt-blue glass, a fluted shape about a foot tall, a wedding present for the marriage that lasted a good long time but not forever. And the pale-shimmery-blue glass pitcher with a long arching handle. It’s very old with lots of bubbles and when I run my hands over it, it feels alive with bumps and ridges. When I lived up north, a few rowdy young bucks attached themselves to my family and would often bring me presents, some lovely things that, in retrospect, were probably not theirs to give. This old glass vase is from the rowdies.

And then there is the urn-shaped vase with the ferns. A brilliant but natural blue, with grey ferns. A potter who lived in Linneus made it. He was not much older than I and died suddenly just a few years ago, and his wife, a few months later. It is the first time I have ever known somebody who died of a broken heart.

And now I have my broken vase, from a friend who has just moved to Kenya. She is a beautiful, brilliant, funny young thing setting the world on fire. When I went to say goodbye, she was furiously sorting and packing, and when I left, she thrust this fat-bellied vase into my hands. Off-white with smudgy black outlines of naked dancing women circling it from top to bottom, its broken body had been repaired by my friend. She missed a spot—a tiny pinhole mid-chest on one of the dancers lets light inside and water out. I love it.

It needs some tending, some time to adjust, some recognition that in this new place, everything about it is still valued, right down to the pinhole, and so I fill it with a few inches of water and stuff all the flowers it will hold inside.