Go into a thrift store, any thrift store. Keep your eyes open: not necessarily for treasures, but for *stories*.
Chances are, if you are alert, you’ll stumble across items that seem to resonate with questions, half-guessed histories, and unfinished quests.
In February of 2024, I wandered by a shelf of carpentry tools in a local Goodwill. There, amid rusting steel, was a gleam of amber varnished wood.
A wood egg, 4.5 inches tall, with hinges on either side.
It seemed familiar.
I vaguely remembered a hobby store in north Phoenix circa 1993 (Variety Crafts? Craft Village?) with a lot of interesting unfinished wood pieces. I was sure I’d seen segmented wood eggs there, but never bought any.
This one was on sale for $4.49. I picked it up, and opened the hinges.
Inside was a winter vignette on each fllat surface: bare trees, delicately woodburned.
The flat base of the egg bore a simple woodburned note: 1996 M. J. MOYE.
I had to save this egg. Or hoard it. I had some ideas of keeping the text and trees, but adding other wood pages to make it into a book.
But more than that, I just wanted to give this thing a temporary spot with me for a few more decades.
After getting it home, I hopped online and did some research. A 1994 woodburned portrait of Roberto Clemente, by the same artist, is in the collection of The Clemente Museum.
This egg was work by a known artist, but one with a lot of mystery. How did the egg get to Arizona, if it wasn’t made here? This is fine enough work to be Art Festival fare.
I changed my mind, I wasn’t going to alter it. Not yet, anyway.
But Project-Brain had already considered the idea, and come up with a wooden page structure, a fiber hinge instead of brass, and a anti-war theme.
Were there still new-in-package wood egg kits out in the world?
I found one, hideously painted and not worth the Ebay price.
Then I found TWO unfinished kits, for reasonable prices, from another Ebay seller!
So I guess a two-book edition is eventually happening.
In the meantime, if anyone knows anything more about wood artist M. J. Moye, please let me know. If they are around or have living kin, maybe the first egg can return to them.