Glass Menagerie

A tiny dinosaur figurine is on the kitchen counter.

The stegosaurus, I believe he is a stegosaurus, with that picket fence-back? Was never that into dinosaurs...so violent, so reptilian. Much preferred unicorns, which were every bit as fantastical but fuzzy. What I did know about dinosaurs was that I'd surely have been a brontosaurus: all long limbs with a penchant for leafy greens and meekness.

I walk over to investigate; Stegosaurus awaits my mother's return, the smile still on his face. Bits of paper towel and crazy glue surround him and I notice his injury: a broken tail. It's a familiar sight, this porcelain animal hospital. I'm home.

My mother collects these figurines, always has. She also collects crystal animals, which are of a higher class, and therefore safely stored to sparkle away in their display case. These guys are older and have a home (literally, it's a wooden shelf shaped like a house, with teeny nook-rooms for each figurine) on the wall.

The wall. I imagine all the crystal animals saying, "Oh, it's a great place to visit but I'd never actually want to live there." Takes a certain amount of grit, I'm sure. Many a tiny animal has hurled himself, premeditated or otherwise, into the abyss that is our dining room. My mother will always nurse them back to health, no matter how small the fragments, no matter that the superglue mars their original form.

"Do you collect anything?" The question was posed to me recently. It took a moment to answer; I pride myself on living simply. I also tend to move homes often, the one upside being a frequent purging of things.

Several years ago my mother began gifting me crystal animals. She's since taken to asking what I would really like (sparkly creatures couldn't keep my fingers warm in Brooklyn). Perhaps I didn't seem terribly enthusiastic about the little guys, and my significant others couldn't appreciate their beauty. Either way, they stopped coming.

A couple of weeks ago I was packing for my most recent, and likely not my last, move. I found a little ball of tissue paper that hadn't been unwrapped since New York.

Inside were my crystal animals. A bunny, a turtle, a duckling, a cat. All were broken save for the cat. I touched their fragments. The Swarovski facets were just as lovely as a diamond ring, the kind of beauty that hurts.

I rolled the animals back into the tissue and packed them away. "They will need mending", I said aloud to the empty room. "They will, they will, we will."