I came to making jewelry after having to abandon the life of a scholar, my first love, because of ill health. For years and years, though I knew my work was good, if for no other reason than the places that carried it, it seemed, sometimes achingly so, a second best, what the runner up does, denied the prize.
In 2000, my 40th high school reunion, I spoke for the first time since I was 18 to my high school sweetheart. In the intervening years, as I had become an artist, he had become an extremely astute collector and critic, sometimes leaving me speechless on hearing one of his observations of a painting, a photograph, even a pocketbook made from 50's barkcloth.
A little afraid, I boxed up several of my best pieces and dispatched them to him so he could see them, necessary because they are often about motion and light, as well as form and color. A photograph wouldn't do.
He wrote the letter that follows in response. I've illustrated it by some of the pieces he was looking at as he wrote... It was a mirror, that letter, and marked the beginning of my acceptance of myself and my gift as something more than a make-do. I am forever grateful....
On Finding Pearl After Forty Years
"As I slip the blade of the cheap but lethal-looking lockback under the tape securing the box, I know the sea of maddeningly sticky popcorn conceals a living part of her. This will be the closest I have come to touching her since we were eighteen and parted, not to meet or hear each others' voices for forty years. I pause, a myriad of color teasing me through the packing, the momentary delay heightening my sense of expectation while Mozart’s piano concerto #21 defines the ethereal space that holds me and what I am about to see.
The first package I open holds a pair of pendulous iridescent earrings, teal and shades of purple, translucent, toying with the light, multifaceted, like her. Then I find a bracelet on single helix wire possessing the variations in texture, the colors and instincts of a Turkish market - a stunningly 
understated necklace of dark glass beads forming an overlapping loop, ending in two strands with colored beads interspersed, playfully punctuating any hint of somberness, as smooth under my fingertips as her young skin.
I hold a blue glass loop interrupted with tiny, delicate red flowers, complete with stamens, to the light and remember how she loved flowers, finding in them a kind of grace, I see now, that otherwise eluded her in life.
Digging through peanuts, my hands enclose a necklace of groups of dark irregular disks separated by mother – of – pearl nuggets, powerful but elegant, like her, its strength its regularity, attenuated by tenderness and the unexpected, a portrait of herself, on a black silk string.
Sculptural bracelets of buttons, their size moderated by the wit and variety of their juxtaposition call my eyes.
I sniff each bag, hoping for a whiff of her perfume. Behind my eyes, I see her as she looked long ago. My hands remember her and she is once again with me as I hold these pieces of her, little bits of glass and shell , stone and pearl, in my hands, against my face, a kind of DNA.
My eyes, my fingers have flooded my senses with her essence. I had not known she was an artist; now I sit reveling in her art. It is spread around me, covering my desk, filling my
spirit. I am touching the edges of the gift through which she transmutes thought, sensation and insight into form and volume. As befits the teenage girl who read Sarte and Camus, she maintains rigorous intellectual control, but it is lightened by humor and that rare ability to know the effect of her creations on the viewer.
I gather in these small, light pieces of her spirit, each a world, and I understand anew what an extraordinary soul she is and know, with overwhelming certainty, at last, why I fell so instantly in love with her in math class forty-three years ago this September."
pearlbamboo
© 2005
copyright e p hodges
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