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Vera Jane Cook

Vera Jane Cook

Chatter Creek Cottage: The Older the Better

I seem to be lost in time. See my image in the glass taking a picture of our new India Cabinet? It makes me think of time, a subject I’ve given to two books because I think time holds the answers, is the mystery. Therein lies the truth behind the sequential lie of past, present and future, none of which exist.

My India Cabinet is two hundred years old and in it’s reflection I am two hundred years old. I love old things and old photographs because time seems captured. I love paintings that reflect time, an artist seeing something beautiful, putting it on canvas and then giving it back to us. That one still moment that is caught and held prisoner by the illusion that it is gone.

Nothing is gone because we can’t see it. The memory of flying paper airplanes with my father and laughing at a Miami bus stop with my mother is not fading in my memory, it exists in the spontaneity of life, where memory is the keepsake box. One day the box will open and loss will fade away.

I love old things, the eyes that once beheld my treasure, the hands that caressed the very same wood, the admiration for the skill and craft of its creator. I am in the moment with my antiques and my keepsake box and time teases me with my illusions. I can only see as far as I can feel. I can only know what silence whispers while time, complex and endless, taps me on the shoulder.

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