I think my love of glass began in Murano, Venice, when I was about 7 or 8 years old, on the day my parents took my siblings and me to see the magic of glass making: I remember the cool and gray fall day outside, and inside the heat and dramatic flames from the furnaces, from which molten, white hot glass was being taken and blown into delicate shapes.
During my Venetian wanderings the other week, I stumbled upon a tiny shop* that specialized among other things in vintage Murano glass beads. What an entrancing place for me! The shop keeper was a little gruff at first, but warmed up when she saw that my interest was genuine. She began opening drawers here and there, and showing me treasures stored in dusty and forgotten jars.
I picked some blue beads - each made individually by hand, each unique. As the shopkeeper and I checked them one by one, to ensure that the hole had been made all the way through, we chatted about glass-making.
This weekend I sat in silence in my kitchen, in a beam of sunshine, and thought about my first trip to Venice with my parents as a child, and my getaway there with Tom, and the trip we took a some years ago with the boys as little kids, when I was pregnant with a baby who didn't make it. I sat there in a beam of sunshine and strung a necklace with my blue vintage Murano glass beads and my memories.
* Anticlea Antiquariato, Castello 4719/A, S Provolo, Venezia (Tel: 041-5286946)
