If you take up the challenge to collage for yourself, I think you’ll find some revealing things happening. As you are leafing through old catalogs, mass-mailing brochures, and other junk mail, I think sooner or later you’re going to turn a page and encounter an image “jumping out at you,” grabbing your heart.

That’s what happened to me with the central image in this collage:

It’s one of the Willow Tree collection of little figurines designed and molded to convey touching human emotions and interactions. Now, I don’t think I’ve ever met a Willow Tree creation I didn’t like, but this one really grabbed me!

I call the collage “Rocking Chair Care” because it brings back so vividly the rocker my dear mother-in-law donated for the above portrayed purpose, and myself in it, holding my own precious bundle of beloved humanity. It took me right back to the time later when I sang silly songs to that baby become toddler, like…

“Rock, rock, rock in the rocking chair,
Rock, rock, rock. We don’t have a care.
We can go almost anywhere,
Rocking and dreaming in our rocking chair.”

(It warms my heart right now to put those words into print before my own eyes—and makes me smile and smile.)

So I cut out the image from the catalog. As I did, I thought of the books we used to read, snuggled in that chair or, later, in some other, bigger overstuffed one. Two books in particular: The Runaway Bunny and Good Night, Moon. In the latter book, there’s even a loving older bunny (Grandma, probably) rocking in such a chair as she knits and whispers, “Hush.”

So I simply “had” to find some images of those two books. I couldn’t take a photo of them, for they were long departed to said son’s own adult home, to read to his own little loved one. So I searched other catalogs, this time online. I found one with images of these books and printed them out, then messed around trying to reduce them to sensible size, if not exact scale.

It wasn’t hard to reproduce the atmosphere of “the great green room” of Good Night, Moon and the night sky visible through its window. I’d extracted lots of rug images from home decorating and improvement catalogs, oozing greens and blues, and hazy tones that resembled moon-lit cloud wisps. So down onto the 4×6 card they went.

I needed a moon to complete the scene. Of course. So I just cut a half-circle out of plain printer paper.

And there you have a collage with heart. My heart. 

It even inspired me later to write a blog-post-length piece about why I think those two favorite books are so excellent. Which I may publish here… Though I ought to have a new collage to illustrate that first… Hmm.

*****

Previous posts in this series:

Day 1 Collage and 31-Days Introduction

Day 2 Collage: Nothing-But-Junk Fish