mirror mirror on the wall...

We're back at the city house for a week while we teach this workshop. The only thing I like better about the city house than the country house is the bathroom. Well, not the bathroom exactly, since it is very small, about 6' square. You can sit on the toilet, reach over and turn on the faucet at the sink with your right hand and open the shower door with your left. No, what I like about the bathroom here is the mirror, the small framed antique with silver stains mirror. Also the dim light. When I look at my image in that mirror in the dim light, it's what I don't see that I like so much.

I've never really understood the desirability of big mirrors and bright lights in the bathroom and as an artist working in etched glass, I've been in plenty of bathrooms that have just that. Whenever I'm in one of those, I spend a lot of time not looking in the mirrors but at the window where our installation is going on. It's too glaring and the image looking back at me shows every line and pore in excruciating detail.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind aging. I don't try to hide the time on my face with make-up, I won't ever try to erase the lines with plastic surgery. I have no need to look perpetually young. After all, the hills and valleys on my face only mean that I haven't died yet. And I consider that to be a good thing. Each line and the cross hatched texture of my skin represent a life well lived but I don't need to see them highlighted with light and shadow every time I look in a mirror.

This disinterest in mirrors is not new. When I moved into this house 35 years ago, there was no mirror in the bathroom so I hung the only one I had available to me at the moment, the mirror from my antique chest of drawers. Somehow I never got around to replacing it. It doesn't really give me the illusion of youth. I still see that I have aged. I see the lines, I see the gray starting to creep into my hair. I see, more and more, my maternal aunt and sometimes my mother. But it is a soft sight, not stark like the big mirror and bright florescent light in the bathroom of the country house.

We want to do some work in the bathroom at the country house. The people we bought it from had it remodeled with a long counter that crowds the toilet between it and the wall. There is one sink which is plenty but it is not centered in the counter and is not under the mirror. It's at the end of the counter. On the wall above it is one of the cabinets. We find this to be very curious. We want to shorten the counter and center the sink, but the first thing is, that mirror, that large clear mirror, that mirror has got to go.