Implements of construction, part 2

...plus pictures by "someone else"

The strangest thing about the accident that ended my life is that I survived it, but not as me. I had become “someone else,” as opposed to a freelance writer named Judith Hannah Weiss, a person I’d been for 56 years.

I pointed to a chair because I couldn’t say “chair.” I did the same with a shoe. I needed words I couldn’t find to say things I couldn’t say. That is called aphasia. I also couldn’t read or write.

I began making drawings of birds. I had a brace on my right hand so I used my left hand to stick a brush, or pen, or razor in the brace, then drew, painted, cut and glued by moving my right wrist.

I began making very small collages, about 2 1/2 inches square. I liked making things that stayed themselves.

I got into three dimensions, using salvaged wood and began building homes for birds. The homes hatched 1,200 babies a year.

About five years post-accident, I began painting birds. They have carved three-dimensional bodies and countless layers or “feathers of color and light.”

I began scratching anything I could recall on any surface I could find – paper plates, paper cups, placemats, napkins, coffee stirrers and Popsicle sticks. I called them “scraps.”

They were not in alphabetical order, not in numerical order, not in chronological order, but out of order, like me. I stuffed them in brown paper shopping bags, then stashed the bags in a closet. A few years later, I built a book from scraps. But I had also lost my agents. No agents, no book.