IMPERATIVE
Here I am—1,010 followers later— still editing butterflies for my Pinterest board “Beautiful Bugs,” a project I never expected to engage me for more than a few weeks. Why this particular specimen? Because after months of exploration, I’d never come upon this type of butterfly before. Besides, being in such bad shape, it was a temptation I couldn’t resist. How did I repair it? With patchwork—more specifically with a cloning tool in Photoshop that allows you to duplicate areas of an image and apply them elsewhere. Why bother? Well, a vignette I wrote in A Patchwork Memoir might shed some light:
For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt this…prompting?…urgency?…imperative?…to transform anything old or damaged, to repair and restore it to its pristine state. And the more unsightly it is—the more worn, shabby, beat-up, tarnished, stained, or corroded—the better. Why, I even remember, when I was living on Bell Street in Lafayette, surreptitiously lugging a pail of cleaning supplies up the hill at dawn to a small dilapidated house for rent, a fixer-upper that I wished I could afford. I let myself in, knowing the place wasn’t locked, and spent an hour down on my hands and knees, scrubbing the parquet floor in the kitchen—white tiles alternating with teal blue—with cleanser and scouring pads to restore it to its former brilliance. Not for the first time, it occurred to me to wonder if this obsessive need to transform damaged things could be rooted in a wish to restore my brother’s disfigured face.