Arts and Crafts

We fell in love at Provo Craft. We had been together for a long time already, but the fall in love part happened on a corner, in a brick building on Center street. It had been a long relationship…twenty years actually, but I was so much older, well three years anyway. Three years when you  are in school just doesn’t allow for much time to socialize. We missed spending the junior high years together, then I was out of high school before she started and I married and moved away from college before she arrived as a freshman. We just kept missing each other, except for the summers we spent in Phoenix, when by default we watched The Price is Right and Gilligan’s Island while eating cinnamon rolls cooked in that newfangled microwave, that only the wealthy and Dad owned. In the afternoon, we dumped each other off of rubber mats in the swimming pool and splashed each other on our beach towels-not exactly the best way to grow a relationship (unless of course your are my Dad and Carol, so it works sometimes). So we waited and grew and matured and then we bonded, at Provo Craft on Center street in Provo, just up from Jimba’s sandwich shop and a hop skip and jump from the old Tabernacle! 

Life had taken me full circle, from the campus of BYU to Northern California and back again to Provo with a new baby in tow and another one on the way. I needed a friend and I found one in my sister, Cathy! We had one car, it was blue and it only went one direction…forward. If you needed to go backwards, you stuck your foot out the door and pushed-hard. And most of the time, that one car was going forward with Steve inside. So Cathy would come to see me (I have no idea how she got there). We would load Heather in the stroller and we would walk to Provo Craft in the big brick building on Center Street. It was magical in there. So many ideas…I don’t know if we ever bought anything…we were much too poor to spend money, but we looked and dreamed of glass vases full of silk flowers filling the foyers of our dream houses. We looked at glue guns and wooden frames crying out to be decoupaged. We strained our creative impulses so that we could recreate these homey scenes with the sparse supplies we already owned. 

A couple times we even went clear to Salt Lake City, in the car that only went forward to the Relief Society Building, where on the third floor they had a display of so many arts and crafts projects that would whet our appetites to go home and produce homemade Christmas gifts…the only kind we could afford. When we weren’t together we would share magazine pictures and ideas, long before Pinterest, even longer before Instagram. We were homemakers at heart and we yearned to make our homes as Cottage Core as the pictures in the old Better Homes and Gardens we got second hand at the library. Then life got crazy. I had three kids, then four, then five. Cathy moved to California….we shed so many tears, we shared letters, but it wasn’t the same. I stopped crafting and Cathy crafted for two. And then came Geese season.

Geese took over the world, A blue and mauve world covered in white geese with little yellow bows around their neck. Peace had arrived. It was barnyard Nirvana and Cathy was there to help usher it in. She goosed us both. The day my wall hanging arrived, I was in heaven. A lovely quilted picture with a mauve ruffle…the statement piece of my new decor. I could be cool like the rich ladies further up the hill who had geese on their front doorsteps, geese on their countertops and goose feather down comforters on their bed. The geese were followed by the Carousel horses and the terra-cotta flower pot toy soldiers at Christmas and the crossed stitched Valentines for my wall. Then came the ultimate gift, the knitted Santa stockings. The gifts, like the stockings, arrived seasonally, filled with soul, filling places on my mantle and walls, bestowing on me homemade love and making me feel special…it’s why I can’t let them go. 

The years have passed…forty to be exact from the time we fell in love at Provo Craft on Center street. We have established those homes we once could only yearn for, we have filled them with love and children and happiness and sorrows and deep pain and lots and lots of laughter. Through it all we have been co-creators, sisters and best friends and we have shared ideas and recipes and kitschy crafts that have long ago fallen out of style. We have used our combined talents to decorate buildings and houses and weddings and funerals and offices and to make holidays special. And in our dark days, late on dark nights, with goose feather comforters pulled over our heads and cell phones in our hands with my silly screensavers in the background we have reminded each other that we can’t go in reverse, we can only go forward. And when she has helped me to clean and organize and pulls out that wooden carousel horse and raises an eyebrow and wonders why I still have it…I remind her—we fell in love in the aisle with wooden cutouts at Provo Craft when we both desperately needed a friend. 

Happy Birthday Cathy!!