labyrinth of snakes

The last present mom gave me, a few months before she died, was for my birthday, a framed tomb rubbing she'd taken at a Scottish castle. It showed a dinner-plate sized maze of serpents endlessly twining around one another, eating each others tails, collectively forming a massive, unsolvable knot.

I was startled at the depth of the thing.
Her sporadic gift the last several years embodied the banal and depressing, like a commemorative Christmas bulb from the United States Postal Service celebrating the year 1989, or used Polo shirts in unflattering colors.

But they made sense to me. You can't pick a good gift for someone you don't know, or at least I've never been able to. Things for people I'm close to fall into my lap, for anyone else you might as well spin me around blindfolded and shove me through the door of the first handy shop.

This thing was outside her usual scope, so I kept it in the trunk of my car until a couple of weeks ago. Now it's hanging in the living room by the stairs, underneath a picture of teenage me sitting on Bobo's bare mattress in the house on Crandall, so underexposed you can barely trace my outline.

The rubbing is as perfectly sharp and clear as the framing is comically inept- I think she just daubed some Elmer's on the corners, slapped it on a rectangle of posterboard and cut to fit the first flimsy frame on the pile.

I wanted to fix it, re mount it, get a matte and a nice frame and smooth out the wrinkles, but on reflection I let it be.
It's too perfect an artifact of its author's intent.

I always want to fix things, smooth them over and tidy up.
But imperfections have their own stories to tell.