mirror

There's a round mirror on one of the walls in my room. It's held in place by four nails that were placed in a square, and bent in at right angles. Between the lower right-hand nail and the mirror, I've wedged a postcard that I found in Charlottesville, at a bookshop on the ground floor of the old Albemarle Hotel. Most days, there are three racks of postcards outside the shop. Some of the postcards have been there for a long time, and have faded or torn. I stopped there one day to buy a postcard for somebody. I bought one with a photograph of a man sharing a bench with a small elephant, and sent it to an address somewhere on the coast of Washington state. Another postcard caught my eye, because it reminded me of some dolls that a friend was making in Ecuador out of wool and ceramic. I thought I might send it to her, approximating an address and hoping for the best. Then it occurred to me she may have left already, and I decided to keep the postcard. It's a painting of 8 different kachina dolls. The colors are mostly faded reds and still-dark blues, offset with white, and touches of black and turquoise here and there, against a parchment-colored background. I can't decide why postcards and mirrors go well together. Maybe the overlay of images is attractive, or maybe there aren't many noticeable places to wedge the edges of postcards into, but I suspect that it's mostly so that when you look into the mirror, you have the image there to distract you, or to accompany you in some way.