My mother in the early 1990s collected 16 American Historical Society plates. She never displayed them; they are all still in their original boxes. There are four Nativity plates, a Columbus's voyage, several Rose Windows from various cathedrals, a Bald Eagle, the Magi, the Shepherds, Pearl Harbor, a WWII South Pacific plate, the Resurrection, and the one above, Peace on Earth.

As I took pictures yesterday, I was physically uneasy and confused by the war plates mixed with Nativity plates. I couldn't quite grasp that she had wanted both themes, or how they rested together in storage. I assumed she was a little mixed up.

But maybe in a concrete way she was working out something. Maybe peace is enhanced by taking aggression and birth out of their isolated compartments, allowing the painful and the beautiful to coexist in the same drawer.