And while I had written an off-hand comment on Instagram about feeling lonely in my studio life, what she really saw -- if there was anything to see in this photo my daughter took -- was me grimacing while I worked, the crinkle in my forehead deepening, because for the last 3 weeks I've been in horrible pain.
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When I was nine, I broke my two front teeth in an accident at a friend's house, and when I say it's the gift that keeps on giving, I'm dead f-ing serious. Most recently, my beautiful 10-year-old-finally-I-was-at-a-place-in-my-life-where-I-could-afford-it veneer on one tooth exploded, leaving me with a horizontal crack millimeters away from meeting in the middle and maybe/probably sloughing off. Like, you know, while you're on vacation. Did you know there are a number of dentists in Lihue, Kauai who specialize in dental emergencies? There are. I programmed their numbers into my phone before we left Alaska, but I never had to use them.

I talked about memory in another post called A History of teeth. How it is fleeting. Reshaped again and again. But going through this at 45 -- the shots (were there 3? or 4?) having my veneer and the crown beside it pried off, cracking and splintering, filling my mouth with shards and exposing the brown nubs beneath, then wearing a one-piece-double-tooth temporary affair, much like a rabbit tooth a few shades too white for two weeks while the "real" crowns were created  -- it all returned me to my 9-year-old self. 

Vulnerable. Wanting to hide. Unable to sleep.

And reminded me how the body, how pain, holds memory.
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We've discovered that what remains of one tooth has a fracture disappearing beneath my gum, leading into the root. I may have 10 more years with this stub, or 20, or a handful of weeks. My dentist said if I feel intense pain ("You will know..."), we can't opt for a root canal on such a fragile shard, that it would be better to take it out completely.

A dental implant is a process, involving a number of frightening steps, and time. Suffering.

But for now, I have two new crowns. Lovely, ever so slightly different from the former, flatter on the bottom, a little too perfect, with a different curve along the backside that I can't keep my tongue off of. They are an unknown maker's idea of what my teeth should look like. This hand different from the one who fashioned them 10 years ago. Different still from what my natural teeth would have been like, if given the chance. 

Working along the ghosts of women, other unknown makers whose cloth I use in my own work, makes me think a lot about the luxuries I have, as a woman, which they did not. 100 years ago, I would have broken my teeth at age nine and they would have remained that way, turning brown, decaying and eventually pulled due to infection. And I would have screamed for them to please pull the teeth, because this was the place I was in just 48 hours ago, before I returned to my dentist with my molded night guard mouth piece (I'm a clencher), which didn't fit the new crowns, and a plea for pain killers to take the edge off the ice pick that had lodged in my gums and was now probing my sinuses and reaching molars.

I'm not a pussy. I have a ridiculously high pain threshold. I had two natural childbirths, the second was frank breach. That's right. I delivered a frank breach daughter, the effect of crowning twice, with no pain medication, an anesthesiologist standing by in an operating room filled with flustered nurses and about 20 other people who'd never seen an actual frank breach delivery, also my husband, my midwife, a good doctor-friend and a perinatologist who was a BAD ASS, who'd done deliveries like this before and used her entire body to corkscrew that girl out of me in one elegant movement that my husband still demonstrates for friends. Ask him. He'll do it. 

Did I mention I also had an undiagnosed 12 mm herniated disk in L5 at the same time, and my foot had gone numb 2 weeks before she was born?

It's still numb because I have permanent nerve damage.

The threshold. It's high.
This is not a good thing.

But this time, I was ready to ask the dentist to pull it. Pull. It.

Within 36 hours of taking antibiotics, it's now become clear I had an infection. That exposed crack a conduit for whatever bacteria wormed its way deep inside the root. 

And isn't that the way? How pain starts as something humming with each heartbeat, then a pulsing hot throb and finally a snap of unspooled threads reaching far beyond the epicenter? And when relief comes, if it comes, it settles like an animal at your feet. Blinking and sighing.

So, Dear Aude, thank you for asking. I am fine.
Now.
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I am fine now.

If you are interested in a sometimes-newsletter (I just sent out my first one even though I've been talking about it for over a year), please visit the contact page. I'm kind of excited by how many people subscribed already. Okay, blown away actually.

If you have subscribed and didn't receive a newsletter last week with exhibition and Inheritance Project updates (shit's happening, some of it I can't even tell you about yet), please check your spam filter and mark me as non-spammy. Because, I'm not. Nothing makes me feel better than an empty inbox.

Well, other things make me feel pretty good, too.
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I know, I know. I said I wasn't accepting anymore boxes of mystery after last fall. I know.

But...how do you say no to Judy Kirpich?

Look out folks, I'm going all Fan Girl here. If you live under a rock (probably next door to me) and don't know who Judy Kirpich is, then you need to look her up. I started following her blog, Un-multi-tasking, a few years ago after her work was chosen for the cover of the  2011 Quilt National catalog. She's a seemingly fearless ​slicer, insert-er (except that's so not a word) and mistress of scale. I personally think she's a really great person even though I've never met her, or spoken to her in person, or know her at all ... and that just goes to show there are internet stalkers out there all posing as amazing textile artists who I consider my "friends" because I'm just that naive...

but ... Judy Kirpich's box of mystery:

Thank you, Judy, for sending me an out-of-the-blue box of mystery, filled with delightful snippets of history from unknown sources.

Like these filmy trims of netting and machine-made lace.
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And the sturdier trims of crochet and tatting.
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The cotton eyelet trims, inset pieces and collars.

The square doilies.
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And others -- probably antimassacars -- of unusual shape.
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And here's the thing -- I've had that pale pink rope (from the first image) hanging in my studio for a couple of years. My husband once made a tasteless joke about me hanging myself from it ... or that might've been my gross joke ... but I've been saving it because I knew when I salvaged it off a beach in Prince William Sound that it would someday be something. 

I'll keep you posted here on serendipity as well as all the other work I'm completing for Inheritance. I have one year until my solo exhibition. Hang in there while I freak out repeatedly.

A real internet friend would hold my hair while I throw up.

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For other posts about the Inheritance Project, click on the sidebar categories Boxes of Mystery or Inheritance Project (and scroll past this one, which will show up first and make someone like me think I've done something wrong).

One year ago on this blog: PechaKucha

Two years ago on this blog: Strange Beauty