The box in the shed included two paper making kits, tins and bags of outdated tea leaves, lavender stems, and rose petals,
as well as a shoe box filled with the dust and shreds of a silk shade from a lampshade of my grandmother’s.
Clearly, I had intended to make paper for many, many years, and I was unwilling to relinquish that vision.
I like the smooth blank pages in journals, I like tissue paper and wrapping paper, boxes of which I keep in my supply closet just in case I need to wrap a gift, or fill in the white gaps of a collage with a splash of bright color, floral curve, or silver stars falling through black space. My “collections” are fairly organized, but my unwillingness to let go of the scraps is also legend. My son and husband have received many gifts wrapped in reused paper, the edges where tape ripped them cut off, new tape holding the folded sides around the presents. They laugh, I save. I have pads of colorful construction paper to offer kids when they visit, I have pads of pastel paper, water color paper, and even some glossy-smooth paper from the days when my son used finger paints. There are a couple of reams of printer paper, and a pile of scratch paper from recycled pages already printed and read. And I keep the brown paper that arrives in boxes to keep the contents from rolling around, which I re-use to wrap outgoing boxes. I have kept maps, and magazines, journals and, of course, books.
I love paper. I love the texture, the variety, the stiffness or flexibility. I appreciate the wide range of colors, the endless possibility of size or shape. Postcards, stationary, notecards, small writing notebooks, spiral notebooks, and loose leaf lined pages. Legal pads abound, their bright yellow piles, legal sized or memo sized, and sticky note pads too, stashed in the file drawer beside my glass desk.
And so, once I had melted and poured all of the candles made from saved wax stubs,
stored over 30 years in 12 coffee cans, melted the wax in a pot I’d found on a neighborhood walk,
made wicks out of string dipped in hot wax with bolts tied to them to weight them down and dropped them into saved spice jars, empty jam jars, and various glass receptacles I had stored,
and poured lots of candles,
then let them set to dry,
it was finally time to make paper!
