Family Artifact #1

mexicanfeatherart
Originally uploaded by Randuwa.

I have this feathercraft image of a Quetzal bird made of feathers and perched on a painted branch with stippled foliage and flowers. It's in a hand carved frame. My parents bought it while on a western trip back in the early 1950's. My father had been home from World War II for nearly a decade and he and my mother decided to take his parents, who lived in Flintstone, Maryland on a road trip west to visit her parents, who lived in Hobart, Oklahoma. (They met during the war when my father was in basic training in Hays, Kansas. My mother was in beautician school and she and her girlfriends would drive up from Woodward, Oklahoma to the base to "dance" with the soldiers on Saturday nights.)

The trip took a couple of days and they stayed long enough to make a side trip to Mexico--some border town, nothing extravagant or complicated. And while there they acquired this feathercraft image.

Both of my parents have passed into ancestry now, and I have grown to cherish this little picture. Partly because I cannot honestly imagine either of my parents traveling outside of the United States...and with both sets of grandparents, no less! And though I was years away from entering into the family, I imagine that this was a happy adventure for them. It was the only time that Harry and Zola met George and Hazel (my grandparents); and it is reported that George's good humor enchanted my father's parents.

The little objet d'art hung on a wall in my parent's bedroom throughout my life, and while my sister (and only sibling) thought it tacky, I thought it gracious of her to let me claim it in the division of the estate.

The back of it contains a little history in 5 paragraphs entitled: "The Story Of Mexican Feathercraft". To Quite from it: "Even before the Spaniards conquered Mexico in 1521, feathercraft was already an ancient art." And in an enlightened, environmentally responsible assertion "Although feathers of wild fowl are no longer used, the selection of the various qualities, the slow process of dressing a simple paper pattern with very small feathers at the head, gradually increasing in size as the figure is completed, let you hear the haunting songs of birds in ancient forests of mysterious beauty."

The image hangs on my bedroom wall now. And though there's not much that’s "haunting" about the songs of the birds of Takoma Park, they are fond of singing! And I hear their songs every morning as I awake and prepare for work, and as I return home and often relax on my deck. The ancients could scarcely have been serenaded any better.