The layered look

I returned this year from Chattanooga with a vase and a bronze statue. Here's the vase. (Click for larger version in new window.) — I returned this year from Chattanooga with a vase and a bronze statue. Here’s the vase. (Click for larger version in new window.)

If you’ve visited with them in their homes, you can’t have failed to notice that Catholics, even recovering Catholics, have an aversion to undecorated surfaces. And so it is with me. Decades removed from active duty as I am, my love of embellishment remains strong. Same way with incense. In fact, owing perhaps to six years of parochial school, the urge to layer embellishments is frequently irresistable.

The vase in the picture here returned with me from a trip I took to Chattanooga earlier this year. It sat looking the way it does in the picture for only a month before I was compelled to put a bleached nutria skull on top of it, my mother’s ashes inside it and hang a vintage “Do Not Disturb” sign from its neck. We also have a weakness for symbolism.