Meet Robert & Stella
My grandparents. I know, I know, my name is not Robert or Stella which is a plot twist. When I started this business I was making wedding invitations and every design was inspired by a famous couple (Bonnie & Clyde, Rhett & Scarlet, Elizabeth & Darcy, etc.) It just seemed fitting for my wedding invitation company to be named after a couple whose story created the backdrop for my own.
So much of what I love comes from my Grandma Hammond - handwritten notes, flowers, a summer’s worth of thrifted paperbacks for a couple of quarters. When we moved away from California when I was little she sent us VHS tapes of anything she thought we might like that came on TV, her looping script labeling episodes of Carebears, Hallmark movies, and Anne of Green Gables. She taught us how to crochet and sprinkled cinnamon sugar on our toast. She made us blankets and dolls and floppy sun hats from fabric scraps. She showed us how to get the nectar out of a honeysuckle blossom after we buried our faces in the vines to breath in the scent. The space around her was always soft and kind.
The night before my wedding she asked me to come sit with her in our living room. She had taken the bus from Idaho to come to Utah a few days before, holding a white box on her lap the whole ride so it wouldn’t get “smooshed”. She handed me the box and told me I could open it. Inside was a mountain of pink tissue paper. She smiled and said to smell it - she had sprayed it with perfume to make it extra special. Among the layers of tissue was her wedding gift to us - a $50 bill. It was everything she could give. A true gift. Our wedding was one of the last times I saw my Grandma. In a cruel twist of irony, lung cancer would take her instead of my Grandpa two years later.
When I shifted from making wedding invitations I thought about changing the name from Robert & Stella, but the thought would always snag against something I couldn’t name. It just didn’t feel right. And then, a few years ago, I was working through The Artist’s Way when the reason clarified right in the middle of a page. The second chapter is about recovering a sense of identity, and the author talks about her grandma, who most people would agree had a hard life married to “an elegant rascal with a gambler’s smile and a loser’s luck… made and lost several fortunes, the last of them permanently. He drank them away, gambled them away, tossed them away…” But despite that, her grandma saw life as a series of small miracles that she documented through letters. She paid attention to every detail around her and wrote it all down.
“The truth is, we all knew how she stood it. She stood it by standing knee-deep in the flow of life and paying close attention.
My grandmother was gone before I learned the lesson her letters were teaching: survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention. Yes her letters said, Dad’s cough is getting worse, we have lost the house, there is no money and no work, but the tiger lilies are blooming, the lizard has found that spot of sun, the roses are holding despite the heat.
My grandmother knew what a painful life had taught her: success or failure, the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.”
There it was. The capacity for delight. I recognized my Grandma on that page, living a parallel life of struggle and sadness, but choosing to wade into the small moments of brightness and beauty and soak them in. She left a quiet legacy of noticing that shaped how I see the world, created the well that I draw from. Her life is not the backdrop to my story, it is the prologue. What I create is a continuation of what she did. This is probably why I always cry during the scene in Moana where she is surrounded by all of her ancestors, a line stretching to both horizons. I feel that - I think I’ve always felt that. A long line of women who held what beauty they gathered from a generous, broken world and passed it along from hand to hand to hand. I guess that is what I’m trying to do with what I make too - pass a little bit of beauty along the line, hoping it reaches you.
We do not become storytellers.
We came as carriers of the stories
we and our ancestors actually lived. We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
We do not become artists. We came as artists. We are.
-Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés
