Telling a Story With Clay

Halloween marked the three year anniversary of marriage to the man who I can truly call the best friend I have ever had. We're one of those couples that met on the playground as kids, and I fell head-over-heels for his little Harry Potter-looking self. But not long after that meeting he and his sister, a good friend of mine also, moved to a different school. It would be six years before we all met again; his sister and I kept in touch always, but he and I didn't stay in touch for long, and we moved on and developed relationships and I even got married to a guy I met my senior year of high school. We got engaged within a year and were engaged for three years, and divorced within a year. Hey, we all make mistakes though, right?

 1996, he was 8 when we met.

He has seen me at my very best and very worst and still manages to love me (and I'm one of those temperamental red-heads, so life isn't always poops and rainbows as my aunt likes to say). That is true love, my friends. Year in and year out, how do you show someone who means so much to you how much you love them without rehashing a ghost from gifts past or falling back on a cliche? This was what I was thinking last week, but then I though: why not tell a story?

 I molded all of this from clay, then glazed.

 Each piece is a milestone in our relationship. From when we first met in elementary school, the top tile, all the way up until our third anniversary, the bottom pumpkin. The E-7 represents the first apartment we got together. There's a tile in the shape of Pennsylvania from where we moved and spent Halloween and Thanksgiving there before we moved back home to Tennessee just in time for Christmas, represented by the Christmas tree. The pieces have the year of the event carved into them, as well as a detailed sheet that explains. But they really didn't need an explanation when I handed it to him; it was a clear storyboard of our lives together.

The best, most thoughtful gifts really are the ones that we sit awake at night constructing when everyone else is asleep in bed. The ones in which we invest time, sometimes money, and lots of love. That love is what they see when they open it, and it means more than any store bought gift ever could.

Amy's Creations