Mosaic from Shards
Painting the Ocean
By Margaret Kellermann
One Saturday 33 years ago on Governors Island, a tiny asphalt-covered patch in the middle of New York Harbor, I was feeling fragmented and lonely. Watching my two young sons climb the monkey bars at the playground, I was concerned about all the boxes I had to unpack in the apartment.
We had just moved there from Palo Alto, a place of palm trees and fountains. I was missing something, but I couldn’t name what it was. Though the island was only a stone’s throw from Manhattan, it had no bridges — only a ferry. To me, it felt like Alcatraz.
While my sons were playing, I dug in the sand and came up with a piece of blue and white pottery. I dug some more and found lavender, white and blue shards. The boys came over to watch. “What are you finding?” they asked.
“Pieces of a puzzle,” I told them. “These were plates and cups from centuries of people who lived on Manhattan Island.” I told the boys the story of how the little island came to be made almost entirely of discarded ground from Manhattan.
To make space for the web of subway tunnels throughout New York City, workers had carved out tons of soil, rock and accumulated refuse. They dumped the loads just behind our small island, more than doubling its size.
“Come help me look for more pieces,” I said. We dug like archaeologists, finding more pottery shards. We piled them all on a big rock.
“Now what do we do with all these pieces?” asked my practical son, the scientist.
“Make them go together,” said my other, practical son, the inventor.
“What should we glue them onto?” I asked.
“Well, we could put them around a picture frame,” suggested the inventor.
So that evening we sat around the kitchen table, gluing the washed pottery around the border of a white wooden frame. “It’s like a puzzle, so it needs something to go inside the frame,” decided the scientist.
The inventor searched the room. “I know!” From an open packing box, he grabbed what was on top: a blue and white ceramic sign. I hadn’t remembered to hang it inside the new house. Fitting into the frame just right, the sign was the last piece to our puzzle. It said:
Just to be with those we love is enough.
Margaret Kellermann can be reached at bluelakestudio.net/ contact. Parts of this article were previously published in Made With Love (Tyndale: 1997), under her previous name, Margaret Smith.
http://www.bluelakestudio.net/contact
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‘I was feeling fragmented and lonely.’
