In the middle of May, I needed to get my work tables cleared off so I could have space to sort the ephemera I have collected over the last two years. Ephemera— I just looked the word up in the dictionary—means “for the day, short lived,” and is also the name of a group of insects like May flies.

Mixed media artists use the word to refer to odd things that are attached to art pieces to add interest, texture, and complexity, fill in spaces, and give the work a personal touch. Some things that are commonly used are small artificial flowers, plastic gear shapes, beads, and ribbons.

For me and my collage artist friends, ephemera is anything we find that catches our interest, and appears to have been abandoned or no longer needed. For instance, I have acquired frames from glasses that have been driven over numerous times in parking lots, which are easy to use because they are so flat.

My favorite place to acquire and enlarge my stash is in the garages of estate sales. Dusty box lids or jars with odd nuts, bolts, washers, screws, extra pieces of things—junk to most normal people—can be had for small change. I also find all sorts of junk in my yard, even after twenty-one years. Rusty wire, nails, shoe cleats, hooks, as well as bird feathers, seed pods, butterfly wings, palm bark fiber, and termite sculptured wood pieces, to name just a few.

On my “To Do” list for May 15, was to put away the junk on the drawing board. I had been dropping things here all though March, intending to make a collage as soon as I could get to it. By May, I’d rather lost the “want to” feeling, but when I looked at the items, I quickly decided it would take longer to put each of them away in their designated container than to assemble the collage.

The large yellow sales receipt is from the mattress I bought in December, 1996, which I had just replaced with a new one. I have been cutting up old magazines for months, and found an article about the San Joaquin Delta, just west of here, with a nice map, as well as the two square photos of animals.

The odd dark shape in the lower right is some palm bark fiber which landed in my driveway. The half circle next to it was found on my lawn. It is half of a label from a spool of wire . The twig in the center is from the birch tree outside my dining room. I don’t know which bird left me the orange and black feather. The rusty nail is the latest one I found.

This 10” x 10” collage is glued to watercolor paper, but still needs to be mounted on a stiffer surface to keep it flat.

Over the holiday weekend I sorted my metal ephemera, including some weird things in the garage that came with the house. I have it all in same size plastic containers, arranged so I can see what I have at a glance. Ah, the satisfaction of a project completed.

Until last Friday, when I went looking for a sprinkler part in the garage, and discovered a drawer of pieces for things that I no longer know what they came with. Some of them look very much like what I was sorting. More ephemera.