Happy birthday!

Oasis FineArt and Crafts at 103 South Main Street, Harrisonburg, VA, has a different Featured Artist exhibit nearly every month. April focuses on that phenomenon we all know so well: birthdays. I didn’t have much time, but I made a few simple plates to play with the theme.

Birthdays mean so many different things to people. We all know some to whom a birthday is, they claim, “just a number.” To someone else it may be a day of joyful anticipation, although in the predominant American culture that stance is probably popular only among the very young or radically different. Birthdays terrorize some, so they deny them with either outright lies or by helping plastic surgeons send their kids to ivy league schools. They never get away with that for very long, but at maybe it’s the race against time that counts. Other people let birthdays turn them into ossified old fossils, grumpy and disheartened, while others just as old decide to appreciate the time they have and work at staying chipper. My friend Evelyn acknowledges that she has “a hitch in my get-along” (that’s an octogenarian “get-along”), but she refuses to let it get her down when she can be out in her garden or visiting with her family or pets.

Whenever your birthday is, whatever mass of numbers you may have accrued, may it be happy! Take time to celebrate you and every one of those years that you’ve had to grow and do whatever you enjoy doing!