Finding Our Blue Sky

It was the day after Thanksgiving and Valerie was tired, too tired to go back up to the cabin in the Smoky Mountains. She had thought that after her work day, she’d head back to start putting up the Christmas decorations at the cabin, lingering in the good feelings generated the day before from the annual celebration of gratitude with dear friends. Instead, she turned the car toward the easier drive home.

Had she gone back to the cabin that night, she would have been looking for an escape from the flames that engulfed the mountainside in a runaway forest fire that destroyed around 1000 homes. Their beloved cabin, the place that held so many of their best memories – weddings, birthdays, holidays, long summer days fishing with their three kids as they grew year after year –  was gone, burned to the ground.

The news hit Valerie, her family and friends hard. This cabin and the land around it had been sanctuary for so many. People joined them there for love, laughter and peace. There didn’t seem to be drama there. They felt their relationship with the cabin, the land and with each other with a sense of kinship that is hard to explain unless you’d been there. Seymour the wild squirrel looked forward to eating peanuts from their hands. Bears allowed themselves to be seen. The blue sky above the trees knit their days together like a favorite patchwork quilt.

Now the trees, the squirrels, the bears and the cabin were gone. Their grief seemed so deep and inconsolable. One friend, who remembered the work that Chris Nordin does, suggested that Valerie collect some ashes from where the cabin stood and ask Chris to make of them a memorial glass sculpture. Valerie had known Chris and his wife Michelle for many years, having visited their glassblowing booth annually at the Renaissance Festival in Holly, Michigan. They’d become friends, watching each other’s kids grow up. Valerie knew she could trust Chris’s heart and his artistic vision.

As she handed Chris the ashes, she had one special request: the sculpture must somehow include a bear. What emerged from Chris’s heartfelt work is a sculpture with a glass bear and blue glass pine trees that mirror the blue sky and contain the ashes from the cabin. These are affixed to a carved wooden base that suggests the living presence of the mountain where the cabin stood until Thanksgiving weekend 2017.

As Valerie shared, “Chris has this sense about him that can take your emotions, your tears of loss, and your memories of laughter and create a bridge to the new.”

 Through this beautiful sculpture, the peace of the old cabin has been brought to a new one, bridging the two cabins together for the creation of more loving memories.

The sculpture that Chris created now sits in a place of honor in the new cabin in those same mountains away from the path of the fire, under the same blue sky. “It makes things okay again.”

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