The glue that binds – a sticky Valentine

One of my first experiences with glue was creating the big paper-festooned Valentine mailbox in elementary school. Large sheets of construction paper in pink, red, white and sometimes lavender were pasted to the sides of a large box. A slot for feeding the box with Valentines was sliced into the top like a giant hungry mouth. Classmates would insert small, usually commercial Valentines inscribed with phrases like "Be mine," "Hugs and kisses" or "Hug me!"

When I taught art in the elementary school, handmade cards were pasted together by my students. I remember the large tub of paste from which students dug out slabs and then dabbed the sticky stuff onto squares of cut-up paper using a small, flat wooden spoon, much like the depressor the doctor pressed on your tongue and told you to say, "Ahhhhhh."

The paste got chunkier and drier by Easter's art projects, and I would hope it would last to the end of the school year. The paste jar, dug three-quarters of the way down to its bottom, sat in a tin on my art cart. However, handmade Valentines were more personal to stuff in the Valentine box that sat like the elephant in the room. My mother, a much more zealous teacher than I, would cut out pages from the old Parade Magazine that accompanied the Sunday bulletin of those days, paste them on construction paper and tack them around the ceiling of her classroom.

I combine collage with my paintings, and I think I got my love of sticking things together from my mother. She painted family genealogy trees with watercolors and glued old black-and-white photos on the branches, then framed them, mostly in the old "hobo frames" she found in antique stores. Also a fancier of what she called "ball fringe," an embellishment found on rectangular spools in notions stores, she glued it onto the bottom edge of lampshades throughout our house. She would often attach a bow tied using a scarf as well.

Bows were a favorite of hers. She had a whole slide-out dresser drawer full of them, all hand-tied, in many colors of grosgrain ribbon. She wore them perched on her meringue-like hairstyle. One could tell her mood by the tilt of her hair ribbon. Tightly tied was a warning of stormy weather ahead, with her mercurial temperament on full display.

She also loved contact paper and would have covered the world with it if she could! She covered our kitchen sink counter surround with it instead of using granite or Formica. The yellow contact paper she used is now peeling off of the same-colored yellow linoleum under it. Most women of today covet granite countertops, but my kitchen sink counter is so small, I have decided to live with it as a memento while peeling the paper up a few slivers at a time.

Mother, along with my grandmother's help, wallpapered what she couldn't cover with contact paper. Bedrooms had printed paper, mostly floral scenes, glued even on the ceilings! In true "Mommy Dearest" form, she once came into my small rented house with two of her acolyte friends while I was teaching school. They, or shall I say she, took the liberty of not asking me; they just went ahead and glued down a rug, and covered all the walls of my bathroom, plus the ceiling, with contact paper in pink, yellow and blue baby-shower gift-wrap colors!

This was to be a delightful surprise for me. It certainly was a surprise, but not delightful! The whole place smelled like hot glue, and the landlord kicked me out. Then, a sheriff knocked on the door of my next abode in Lewes on Pilottown Road and handed me a lawsuit from that landlord. I told him to go to the house in Milton where the real culprit lived, saying he could find her in her beige corduroy La-Z-Boy chair next to the ball-fringe lamps she had decorated while watching her favorite soap operas, "The Young and the Restless" and "The Bold and the Beautiful." She paid the fine uncomplainingly. Anyone should have a mother like that, she somehow reasoned.

All in all, though, I think I got my creativity from her. I love rickrack. I first encountered it in home economics class and never went back. I just hope it doesn't disappear, as fabric stores have been trending down. I don't sew, since I could never thread a bobbin. I wanted to go to fashion school and was accepted by one, even though my mother told me I had no taste in clothes.

When I saw the classes, including pattern-making, which I could never fathom, I decided to major in art. I could never cut a frame mat, either. Mine ended up being crooked and buckled and swelled up, so I started gluing gems on frames and bordering paintings using rickrack. No ball fringe is included; sorry, Mother. But thanks for inspiring me. Here's a sticky Valentine to you.