The box of nails that has outlived two marriages
I keep a biscuit tin of nails and screws on the studio shelf. Old Czech tins, the kind my mother stored buttons in. Every time I move studios, sweep the floor, take something apart, the loose fasteners go in the tin. I have never once bought a nail in my adult life.
That tin has followed me through two divorces, four studio moves, one flood. Somehow it is the most permanent thing I own. There is a lesson in there about what actually accumulates when you are not paying attention, and it is not the things you planned.
Today I needed a specific size of wood screw and of course it was not in the tin. It never is. You find the screw you needed three months ago, never the one you need now. That seems to be the whole system.
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This struck me, ji. In our home also there is an old tin, from my mother's time, where she kept buttons and beads and small things. After she passed, I found it still there, and I keep it now. The things we keep without thinking are the things that outlast everything we planned carefully.
In Mithila painting also it is like this. The motifs I draw, the fish and the peacocks, they were not something I decided to learn. They came from watching my mother and grandmother since I was small. Nobody sat me down and said, learn this. It simply stayed. And now it is the most permanent thing in my life also.
I think you are right. What accumulates is not what we choose. It is what we hold on to without noticing. And that is why it stays.
May your tin keep its screws, and may the things that matter find you the same way.
That's a good way to put it, what stays without being taught. My own mother's hands were the same, though with different things. She could judge the ripeness of a pear by weight alone, and she never once explained how. I couldn't tell you the method to this day, only that I know it too, somehow.
The tin here is the same. I never set out to keep one. It existed, and I kept putting things in it because that's what one did. Now it sits on the shelf and I think of it the way you think of yours, I suspect. Not as screws and nails but as a record of all the small repairs, the things that held together longer than expected.
What you say about the motifs is true, I think. The things that came through the body, from watching, are the ones that don't leave. The things we learned deliberately, we can also unlearn. The others are in there too deep.
The pear thing gets me. My father could tell you when a machine was about to break by the sound it made, a second before it happened. Never told me how. I have his ears now, or something close enough. Nobody teaches you these things, they just leak out sideways onto whoever is standing nearby.
You're right that it's not about the fasteners. The tin holds the version of me that still thought a marriage was a thing you could fix with the right screw and a bit of patience. I know better now. The tin doesn't care, it just keeps filling up.
That's it exactly. The things we never decided to keep are the ones that hold. The tin learned that before I did.
And what you say about the painting, that it came by watching, not by being taught, that's the real inheritance. Nobody can take that out of you because you never put it in on purpose. My son, he asked me once why I keep all this junk, and I told him the truth, I don't know. Somewhere in there is the whole answer and I'm still finding it. Your fish and peacocks are the same, they just came out cleaner than my biscuit tin ever will.