Stained Glass

    I've never really liked stained glass.  When I was little, growing up in the post-depression years, no one had much, including us, and everyone seemed to make do with hand me down possessions, and repaired items, a precursor to today's recycling and thrift shop culture, though back then it was not a choice.  The church we attended was likewise somewhat rundown and in need of repairs, as were many buildings before public funding and Urban Renewal and such. The church had stained glass windows; those above the altar were large scenic depictions of figures both angelic and demonic.  The small glass pieces were inset among metal brackets in random shapes.  It looked to me as  though they'd been broken and repaired, and I didn't like the looks of them, partly because of the grotesque figures, but also because the windows lacked smoothness and symmetry.  In addition, I most likely thought the word stained was not a good thing for glass to be.
   I know people, rational adults, who have taken classes on how to make stained glass, and I could never see the point of patching broken pieces together to try to replicate the stained glass of old.  I didn't care for the appearance of it then, and I still don't.  Frosted glass is another subject entirely; there was, and is, in our old house, a pane of frosted glass in the heavy front door, valid for its purpose of insuring privacy and also for the simple beauty of its symmetry and design. 
    I've been fortunate throughout my life to have had few  acute onset illnesses.  But on the eve of Christmas Eve in 2003, I'd been sick, with what turned out to be Type A Influenza.   During the height of that illness and just prior to the first  emergency room visit of my life, I went into our bathroom; to my eyes,  the mirror of the bathroom cabinet had transformed from the  pure glass it had formerly been into  a vivid display of the most monstrous stained glass imaginable.  The tones were all in blue, which might seem to be visually pleasing, but instead was a  horrendous and sickening sight.  That is when I knew I was really sick---broken, stained and fragmented.