In 2014, I embarked on a year-long art project that came to be called the Mom-box. It consisted of 364 hand-made cards, poems, or letters, created for my mother, to remind her daily that I loved her. I put them each in an unmarked card envelope and bought a decorative box at Michaels for them to live in. She received the box, containing the first batch of cards and an introductory note, for Mother’s Day, 2014. Over the next year she received 10 more batches of cards, in unmarked envelopes. The project closed with a special wrap-up letter sent for Mother’s Day 2015.
Her instructions were to pick a random envelope from the box each day and open it. Of course, she completely disregarded these instructions. I was not surprised. She told me she sometimes enjoyed saving up a week’s worth of envelopes and opening seven of them on a Sunday. She would also stash envelopes around the house, so she’d forget about them, and then stumble upon them later, creating happy little surprises for herself.
We found some of these stashed cards after she passed away in 2016, so she missed a few. I had the box and all its contents cremated with her.
I’m pretty sure this idea was inspired by something I read in a book, though I cannot remember which one. If I recall correctly, the idea in the book was a jar with 365 little slips of paper in it that said, “I love you” or contained some other happy message or inspirational quote. I just took it and ran to ridiculous lengths with it; seeing the joy it brought my mother though, I regret not a single hour spent.
Many of the cards and all the letters are quite personal, and some of the cards contained copyrighted material, though the bulk of them were my work. I am going to post some that I’m comfortable with, in memory of her, because I enjoy showing off my work, and because, while they make me sad, they also make me happy.
