We celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary at a splendid sea food restaurant in Sydney, and I have photographs to prove it. But Wendy also made a wall hanging that marked some milestones of our first 30 years together. This looked absolutely splendid on the exposed bricks of our large kitchen in the row house at 34 Waverley Street in Ottawa. She never meant it to become a permanent part of the decorative art on our walls but when we moved in 1990 from that tall, narrow home to a cottage on Echo Drive, we took the wall hanging with us, and from there it came to our condo apartment. Our reason for clinging to it has very little to do with its artistic merit and a lot to do with memories evoked by the scraps of material she cobbled together to create the images on this old length of faded green fabric. They are all that remains of clothes she made that our kids had outgrown, or that she made for herself or me, and we had discarded. Every piece of material reminds us of our past in happy ways. And the images, or pictures? From the bottom up and right to left, these are a kangaroo (John) and a Kiwi (Janet Wendy); a beach in Adelaide with two stick figures (one heavily pregnant); Sydney Harbour; Trafalgar Square in London; Sydney again, with a cock-eyed Opera House; a sugaring-off hut and ski slope in Vermont; Edinburgh castle; New York, complete with the twin towers of the World Trade Center; and Ottawa, with the Peace Tower, Chateau Laurier, the Rideau Canal at sunset. I fondly think that final top left-hand image shows the influence of French impressionist art we had been admiring in Musee D'Orsay not long before the burst of creativity that produced this wall hanging. It richly merits its place just inside our apartment door, and in the book of Selected Works of Janet Wendy Last.
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