Foxy Burnt Umber

I can't remember if it was an all-day school field trip or a Boy Scout outing, but I got to spend a day of my boyhood in the back room of Denver's Natural History Museum making a habitat sculpture out of clay. It was a proper diorama. I brought a shoebox and clipped the top to create an open-air, open-faced cube like the giant ones behind glass on the main museum floor. Maybe we were learning about all the work that went into those intricate taxidermy displays of extinct nature, or maybe we were learning about the complex yet fragile habitat needs of every living creature, or maybe both. I don't remember. I think it was one of those outings where, at one point while outdoors, all the kids stood in a tight circle then sat on the lap of the person behind them, the person in front sitting on ours, and we were each assigned a name like "food, water, shelter, space" and once we were settled, all the "food" had to leave the circle, so that we collapsed to the lawn in a giggling heap. Environmental apocalypse meets duck-duck-goose.

At any rate, the part I remember vividly is, of course, the part where I was indoors, alone, completely absorbed in a creative project for which I had no training or aptitude. In this case, I was sculpting a fox out of brick red clay. I spent all day on that fox, at least in my memory. I remember struggling with the molding clay's stubborn lack of elasticity, the way I needed to wet my finger and smooth out fissures constantly, especially around the fox's tiny pointed ears and elaborately long tail. I wasn't clever enough to add the important black fluorish to the tail, or the white markings to the underbelly, so in truth it looked more like a red wolf than a fox. In truth, it looked more like a dachschund with giraffe legs and bunny ears than anything recognizably canine. But how I labored!

The fox had a wire that pierced its rotund belly, and this wire was affixed to a styrofoam "rock" I had hastily, sloppily tempera painted gray when I realized I was running out of time. The box interior was also slathered gray. I made some brush strokes of green here and there for grass. I had a big-eared rat on a moldy Cheeto when I was done, while my peers had each created something that at least represented nature, but you know what? I was proud of that fox. I remember spending months attempting to preserve it in my room, wetting my fingers to glue the tail back on every time it fell off under its own weight, protecting it from any bumps or unnecessary sunlight. I was too young (and I was not that young) to understand my artistic limitations. 

I have since built many a janky diorama-like-thing, mostly on the web, but also, occasionally, in my home. Each time, my willingness to craft or create has diminished.

I dragged a beaten-down dresser through my door this weekend after V triumphantly purchased it for a song from some school-benefit garage sale, and I listened as she outlined creative inspiration for its rebirth as a French cottage antique. When I delicately rebuffed each suggestion -- based on the laminate top and useless foot plate and unsandable particle board sides and rather hopeless surface condition in general -- she dutifully blogged more hope into the thing.

It's time to recapture my mangled artistic spirit, accept it for what it is, and dive into a furniture refinish project that, though doomed to end badly, might provide a lesson about the importance of habitat, of commitment to a dwelling. At worst, something critical will be missing and I'll just fall down on the grass for the lack of it, laughing.