Liese Chavez ...Touching the past with a brush dipped in paint…
When I was small, I remember lying on my back under a side table in my Grandparents' house. The tabletop was a round slab of marble, out of which grew a lamp with lead crystal teardrops dangling from a filigree bloom. There was a circlet of these crystals beneath the lamp as well and I watched the front parlor glow in the half-light reflected from these tiny worlds of faceted glass. In that private world just a few inches from the floor, the chairs all had carved feet on the bottom and way above me near the ceiling I could see the undersides of little animal faces in the corners of the moldings. I would climb up the steep stairs to the dusty attic with crates of 45 records and the secret-seeming low doors to mysterious things in storage in the eaves. Sometimes I would hide myself in the tiny sewing room under the stairs or spend hours pawing through Grammy’s costume jewelry, trying on clip-on earrings and peeking into lockets.
One day I came into my grandparents’ house and everything looked different. The tiny details were still there, but I was too tall to see them so intimately anymore. Some of the magic had disappeared. I have been trying to get back to that magical world ever since.
