I started making "memory pieces" upon stumbling onto an antique memory jar covered with the trinkets and flotsam of a families' life. I was fascinated and smitten with the details and symbolic breath of the jar I'd found. To me it was a sacred object of love and honor created with tenderness and poignancy. Memory Jars were a thing in the 50's in Appalachian and the Afro-American south. In Appalachia they were decorative folk pieces. In the Black culture they were more often used as commemoratives for the deceased and even served as burial markers for those who could not afford traditional tombstones. These symbols on the jars were often dog tags, rings, marbles, beads, buttons, watches, small Cracker Jacks toys and the like. They touched my heart and made me wonder about the story of each piece.

I soon began using the jar in creative writing classes I was teaching in elementary schools at the time. In the classes we focused on detail, wrote about what the jars reminded them of, and made memory jars ourselves on recycled glass jars.

One day it occurred to me I could make a jar with the trinkets of my children and my life. I did. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Over the years I've created flat and multi-dimensional pieces from yard sale flotsam and jewelry, broken stained glass, fast food toys reflecting the latest popular movie characters, beads, sand and natural materials. Quite often I include little hidden poems and Lowkus [an Appalachian form of the haiku I invented] in my works---adding a literary component.

These mosaics are about as "green" as art can come and capture moments about to be imminently lost in our sometimes unsentimental and usual throw away culture. I use 99 per cent recycled materials including yard sale picture frames of prints picked up for a pittance just before being thrown out.