Glass

I love how transparent glass is. Light shines through clear glass. Glass is fragile and breakable. In 2009 I read a decorating blog where a glass based lamp was featured in the living room. The entire base of the lamp was made of a bottle or jar shaped glass. Inside the glass jar which formed the base of the lamp there was nothing. But at the top of the lamp there would have been a bulb which was invisible because it was shaded by a fabric lamp shade. I did not notice the shade. I only noticed the base because it was made of clear uncolored glass. And there was nothing in it. I thought the lamp was so cool. During Christmas the blogger filled the glass base with colorful Christmas ornaments and I thought it was such a pretty way to show your Christmas ornaments. I liked the glass based lamp so much that I started looking in stores in the mall and in pottery barn websites for a glass based lamp like that for my home but all the ones I saw had an electrical wire running through the inside of the glass base connecting the bulb to the electrical outlet. So I did not buy it. A few months ago in a store I was working in I saw a pumpkin made out of glass just before fall. This was clear un colored glass shaped like a pumpkin that let light flow through it. The pumpkin has a glass lid at the top of the pumpkin and a little glass twig at the top of the glass lid to represent the stem of the pumpkin. It would be so cool to fill a glass pumpkin like that with candy during Halloween I thought. During Thanksgiving we can perhaps put small pumpkins or gourds in it. Before I saw this glass pumpkin this year I have never seen clear glass pumpkins. I have seen orange colored or green colored glass pumpkins with twisted stems but never clear glass. After I saw the glass pumpkin I started thinking about the presence of clear glass objects in my life. Hobby Lobby a store which I used to visit quite often earlier but less frequently now I used to look at glass flower vases. Occasionally I bought a few and painted them to make them more prettier. Hobby Lobby also has a collection of glass jars with metal lids which you can use to store kitchen supplies such as flour and sugar. I went through a phase in my life when I bought glass jars from hobby lobby filled it with flour or sugar labelled the jars with elaborate labels made with scrapbook paper and ribbon so as to make the kitchen in my home look like a kitchen in a fairy tale or children's story book. But I never thought much deeply about glass as a substance until I saw the glass pumpkin in my store this year. Glass is made with a substance in white sand which is the sand in my mother's native place. The sand in my mother's native place is called panchara manal or sand that looks like sugar. To date I have never seen any place in this world which has white sand. The most pristine beaches have light brown colored sand but not white. During my childhood and youth truckloads of sand were taken from my mom's native place to glass factories to make glass. My mother's brother in his compound had a hill made of white sand. The entire hill is made of the softest sand. If you try to climb the hill if you fall it will not hurt you because the sand is soft. And because it is white you will not even get dirty. At the top of the sand hill was a cashew tree. The root of the cashew tree came all the way down to the base of the hill. We as kids when we visited my mother's brother's house climbed to the top of the hill by holding on to the strong root of the cashew tree. At the top of the hill many cashews would have fallen and sprout tiny saplings of cashew trees with contain green cashews on them. At the bottom of the hill there was a stream with tiny fish in it. Once when we went there the hill in my mother's brother's house was gone. The whole hill which consisted entirely of white sand was sold to a glass factory. In my earliest childhood when our car entered my mother's native place it felt like entering into a world that suddenly became whiter. The coconut trees were still green, the hedges were still made of brown braided dried coconut palm leaves wide expanses of paddy fields but the soil had suddenly become white. It was the quaintest place with the whitest sand. Every once in a white we would see small and big hills of white sand. It was enchanting to see. When we first went there we were so enamored by the soft white sand we would bring back sand in plastic bags back to ernakulam. The brown mud in the flower pots in our ernakulam home was covered with the white sand from my mother's native place. Two years ago I went with my mom to thyccattussery. The sand there is still white but there is only a thin layer of white sand there and not an abundance of white sand like in my childhood. All of the sand has been sold to glass factories. That area does not look like it used to. The quaintness of the white sand is no longer there though it is still picturesque because of the paddyfields. I have never been to a glass factory. However when I see glass objects --lamp bases, flower vases, jars for holdinig things in the kitchen I am reminded of the white sand in my mother's native place. I liked the glass base of the lamp for no particular reason. I liked the flower vases in hobby lobby and the glass containers with metal lids for no particular reason. But after seeing the glass pumpkin I remembered telling my child about the white sand being taken to the glass factories and may be when I look at the glass pumpkin in the home department in my store I am seeing the white sand in my mother's native place. Maybe I instinctively liked the glass lamp base with nothing inside and the flower vases and the containers because I liked the white sand in my mother's native place which was soft and looked like white sugar. One glass based hobby lobby project idea I liked a lot was to put pebbles in a glass Square vase, place small white roses in them layer the pebbles with moss and put a string of jute around the vase. I never made this. Earlier I did not see the connection between a glass object in the United States and the sand in my mother's native place. But this year I started seeing the connection When I saw the glass pumpkins in my store I remembered the white sand in my mother's native place. Here is a picture of the Hobby Lobby project I have yet to make.