Inside the Spin-Mosaic Studio

The "lavatory" in this Amish homestead was a pristine novelty.

Everything was functional, though extra loud, as the system was different. Embellishments, shelves with knickknacks or hanging pictures were absent.

The floor had no annoying chord tails dangling from cooled curling irons teetering on the edge of the counter. No powdered makeup-dust collected around the porcelain ridge of the sink's edge. No tiny shaved whisker clippings pooled at the base of the metal sink plug, like at my home. There was nothing on the counter at all except for a bar of soap.

Bath towels were taken directly to the clothesline. Only one pastel hand-towel perched near the water source. Other than that, a roll of toilet paper inset in the wall on its little turning coil near the place of greatest need...was the only other thing in the room.

That's why the curtain was such a novelty.

Whispy cotton curtains hung over the window that overlooked the back field. This was not the novel curtain; this was the normal curtain. 

There was also an unusually placed decoration; a little curtain strung across the mirror. Light buttercream cotton panels were hand-sewn to fit the small rectangle frame secured on either side by a spindly white rod.

I remember thinking it odd that Nia, busy as she was with the homestead chores, would take the time to sew a tiny curtain and mount it across the view of the only reflection available other than peering into the rain bucket at the corner of the eavestroughs.

Nia and her daughters watched my little blonde sweetie while I taught at the rural school nearby. Before she and I climbed in the truck for our 30-minute drive back to our house, we often made a stop in this very important room. A half-hour drive to a toddler may as well be 3 hours if nature is knocking. 

She was too short to see the little curtains in front of the mirror. I was too tall not to look between them while I washed my hands at the sink.

It was back home in my own kitchen within the pages of an Amish cookbook gifted by my mother, that I learned of the true identity of the novelty mirror-curtains. The cookbook included side-margin tidbits-of-interest about Amish kitchens and culture. I was as surprised to find a lavatory tidbit within the pages of a cookbook as I was to find a hand-mended curtain panel hanging on either side of Nia's mirror.

The cookbook told me that curtains are affixed to mirrors in Amish households as a reminder to minimize and help resist the temptation of vanity.

All those visits to that little room with my daughter, and I never knew. The concept was such a familiarity to them, no one thought of telling the nice English lady. 

It was here that I checked my straggly end-of-the-school-day hair, and rubbed off common streaks of paint or marker on my cheeks from 8 hours in an Art classroom full of kids with waving octopus tentacles instead of arms and legs---especially on days when the cafeteria served sugar in the form of orange creamsicle ice cream bars.

Ear-to-ear could not be seen when I looked into the narrow reflection. I had to shift from side to side to catch a view of my full face as if swaying to the rhythm of a country song heard only in my head.

One day, there was a new momentary novelty in the lavatory room: a thread had jarred itself loose from the bottom corner of the sacred vanity-curtain. As the curtain was never touched, the thread was not a fray from wear or age, but a rogue free-spirit tempted to freedom by the breeze of the wild field through the open window.

I walked over and took a closer look at the wild field from where the breeze came. My rushing eyes had been so caught up by the allure of the anti-vanity curtain mounted in an unusual place in memorandum of an unfamiliar conviction that I had never stopped to view what was behind the regular curtains mounted over the regular window. 

The field was peaceful, beautiful and still like an ocean before a storm. A scurrying mother bird lighted on the crossing of a branch that would soon hold a nest.

As if acting on their own accord, my steps backpedaled to the mirror. My fingers pulled the breeze-inspired thread from the bottom of the sacred curtains.

The thread was fed through a small puncture in the window screen. I let go. It flew away quickly like the twist of scales when a fish is released from a hook and returned to the water.

The mother-bird eyed my action and took flight. But, she was not the only living one to see. Is it vanity to retroactively become self-conscious of poetic actions with the same critique as how we gaze at our own appearance in a veiled mirror?

The wild field belonged to the alpaca. Today, she was an unusual picture of victorious vanity--or, was it victorious contentment?

Half-shorn and scraggly, she wore a look of triumph in her eyes like a fashion accessory. Her bald knees stood firmly planted along the farthest edge of the pen on the closest side of the wild field. From there, she stared at me as though she knew something I did not.

I suspected the nest-in-the-making contained a fair share of fine alpaca wool along with the thread of a sacred curtain. The mother bird would need to lay an egg of gold to be worthy of such a nest!

------

As my daughter skipped down the cement porch steps towards the truck that day, I pointed to fresh hoof-prints in the sandy gravel that did not bear the image of horse, donkey, dog or chicken.

"Alpaca prints?" I winked to Nia's middle daughter. "Looks like it's shearing day? Will you soon be knitting a sweater for winter?" 

I had thought it was a simple sing-song question that could not be misinterpreted within the translation lapse of English-to-German-to-English. But, Nia's littlest girls had not spoken English very long.

"These are not alpaca prints."

"Oh, is she not an alpaca--a llama, then?" I could not stop at this Amish homestead for even one day without receiving a lesson on something natural.

"These are mad prints--deep in the dirt. She ran away from the clippers." She said the word mad as if stating the obvious. She had watched her older sisters patiently explain strange and simple things to me before. With a gentle and quiet spirit, she explained the obvious to me as well.

"Prints are not horse, donkey, dog or llama. We already know what animal they are. We don't need to say it. Prints are...walking, running, standing, or...mad."

My eyebrows alone expressed my wonder as words fell short.

"We do not shear because we need sweaters. We have sweaters." She spoke as unblinking and sweetly pragmatic as a girl in pastel could. 

"We tried to shear her because she looked hot. But she loves herself the way SHE IS!"

------ 

Clearly, the lesson of the vanity curtain had translated beyond German or English into the language of the heart at this homestead. Both vanity and contentment was recognized from the youngest to the oldest to the wildest.

Contentment with humble confidence is derived from love: love of others, from others, and a healthy love of self. Love, is celebrated as first from God to us.

Contentment is easier to grasp by looking away from our own image. Look away and out through the window from where the fresh breeze flows. As the Bible says in Revelation 4, "Listen to the wind-words of the Spirit...".

Leave vanity captive behind a half-open, hand-sewn curtain---a curtain with one less thread woven into a nest beneath a mother bird.

Here will lie a golden egg.