Staff
Inside Beads & Things
Trip to Uncle Bucks
Drepung Gomang Tibetan Monks

Open since 1990 serving Southeastern Ohio and beyond with beading supplies and instructions
Sharing our love of beads and teaching basic beading techniques.

From back left to right:
Quinn, Chrystie, Phil, Des,
Audrey, Joey,
Rachel, and Jill.
Fall 2002

From left to right:
Robin, Audrey, Helen, and Chrystie.
Summer 2005

Unstrung
by Helen Weaver Horn
10/26/2001

The After Life, could it begin
in something like this
quiet little store I enter with
my mother's broken string of beads?

The walls are hung with strands
of red, brown, turquoise, lined
with shelves of labeled bottles.
Are brightly colored bits
of former lives all disassembled,
sorted, waiting here?

I hand a kindly woman
my small crumpled envelope.
If only I could reconnect my mother
with her wits, her wisdom, scattered
and unstrung. At ninety-three
she asks again what I just answered,
utters dire suspicions, rants
and whimpers, grips
my hand like iron.

Here everyone is gentle.
I can tumble out her crystals
on a channeled pad, arrange them
from biggest down
and string them peacefully.
The woman helps me bend
the wire to fasten on the clasp.

About me, golden ambergris,
and wampum, richly carved
and burnished trading beads.
I feel how ancient, elemental,
is my mother's will
to deck herself in glowing colors,
magic shapes, her will
to wear them even when
she goes to bed, run her fingers
over them - her rosaries
and worry beads, her charms
and amulets against all spells.

This ordered place breathes out
a blessing, gives me hope
that all the precious qualities
which scatter as we fall apart
will re-collect somewhere,
still luminous, and gather
into something wholly new.