Museum

It started with cleaning off the bathroom sink.  I'm not telling you what I found, but it was organic, human, and came off of me obviously as I am the only primate in here.  No, no, don't worry, nothing like that, it merely had fallen off after years of stubbornness, and after application of some sort of dermatological magical ointment.  Oogy.  Don't know why it wasn't tossed immediately, it's not like it deserves a ceremony, but there it was, winking up at me.

Okay, it was a callus.  Just a hard nodule that honest to goodness, developed on my finger from: opening endless pull tabs on cans of cat food.  It wasn't large, just there, and I wanted it off.  I don't even like nail polish, it makes my fingers feel numbed as if end caps sealed the ends of my fingers.  I hate most lotion and will wear a ring on rare occasion.  Get it off.

To be honest, it fascinated me back to the days when I owned a microscope and would put hair (looks like a pinecone), sunburned skin peels (porous), and pinpricked blood (cells!) on slides.  Got a dead frog from the science teacher to examine, dragged home found animal skulls from the woods, and had a small box of snail shells, freshwater and land.  Science of growing and the materials produced by it fascinates me.

For example: horns, which stay with the adult animal its lifetime, and antlers, which are living bone that is shed each year.  And why don't people find the hundreds of discarded antlers each year in spring?  This is because the shed antlers are a source of calcium and phosphorus for mice, squirrels, porcupines, and the deer themselves during a time when little else is available.  So, I thought, what else am I collecting?

Seashells, and vintage Halloween.  Reasonable.  Eggs, sort of connected to sea shells and I make pysanky, the eggs colored by bee's wax and a patterned dyeing process. I have a small glassed in cabinet filled with a couple of bird's nests, broken eggshells from robins, feathers, and here we go, any intact dead insect like bees, butterflies, or cicadas.  I put some animal figurines in there also, to make it look like a forest diorama.  A tiny woods house.

The oddest collection, I guess, is the cat's whiskers.  Anytime a shed whisker is found, it gets put in a green hinged box; along with this is a tooth that dropped out of one of the cats head when he became elderly.  I still have some of my son's baby teeth, most of which have split in half for some reason, and a snippet of his baby hair.  Those are in a drawer, not on display like the shells or dead bugs.

So the piece of hardened callus that was there this morning has been discarded for heaven's sakes already; if I was younger and armed with a microscope, I may have stuck it under the lens for examination, but these days, well, no.  It's no wonder I had interest in becoming a medical illustrator at one time, this sort of thing was probably my beginning.  Makes the world go round, you know.

It's midmorning and there are errands, the fish tank needs cleaning, and a cat has to be chased down and brushed.  I hear Min snoring in the carpeted cat tower during her after breakfast snooze, and Saturday traffic rushing up and down the highway.  I need to get out there too and see a few folks.  Maybe you.  Maybe you looking at me, and trying to see which finger the callus recently inhabited.  Gotcha.  It's all a hoot.  Be safe, be well, be nice to others.  It's so attractive.