I wanted to share a few paragraphs from an article in this morning's Anchorage
Daily News about a woman in Fairbanks, Alaska who has parkinson's. The article
was written by Mary Fenno of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. If any of you want
to have all of the article, I can send it in. I didn't know what is proper for
this list, but I thought it nice to hear of one of us who is making lemonade
from her lemon.
"Liz Berry, 71, throws things for a living. Plates, vases, pots. A
menagerie of creations takes shape on the potting wheel under her weathered
hands.
"But six years ago, when tremors left her unable to work, it was Berry
who was thrown off balance. She was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, a
chronic, progressive nerve condition that affects the body but not the mind.
"For a time meditation quieted the rhythmic shaking of Berry's hands,
but eventually that did not work. The shaking in her left hand spread to her
right. Stress made the tremors worse and, for a time, Berry stopped potting in
frustration.
"'It's frustrating when you can't do things, when you've always done
them, she said. 'Now I've incorporated the tremors into the shape of my pots
and I don't mind.'
"The pots she calls 'parky pots' are decorated with a pattern created by
the rhythm of her tremors. Each one is different, and what was an obstacle has
become a unique style for the Fairbanks potter.
"It is nature that inspires her, Berry said. She points to shelves
piled with bags of roots, tundra twigs and branches from around the world. What
she has not collected, friends have sent, and she incorporates each piece of
wood into a pot or bud vase."
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Helen Ormsby [log in to unmask]
"Old soldiers never die. Young ones do."
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