Tapestry from the dark side

My mother and grandmother love to collect "treasures", used stuff from yard sales that might be of value or use. 1950s British pram? Check. Woolen pea coats? Quadruple check. Used chain link fencing, used wrapping paper, leather stirrups, engagement rings, apple coring tools and gravy boats? Check.

I usually end up with a bunch of these worthless pieces of...err.. I mean "treasures", in addition to stuff that I owned and thought I trashed or sold at a yard sale years ago. Might I have a use for all my baby teeth, a fake fur kitty costume from 1988, notebooks from middle school? Yeah I don't think so either.

These "treasures" flow my way every holiday or family visit, and as is customary and cordial, some of it has to go into use to appease the family. One of those items was a tapestry. In college, all the cool alternative kids had tapestries in their dorm, accumulated from their trust fund funded trip to India, tapestries which matched their manic panic purple streamed hair and laissez faire attitude. I wanted a tapestry. I wanted to be a cool kid.

So my mom found me probably a dozen tapestries and is still, over ten years later, trying to pilfer them off to me because I made the fatal mistake of displaying one of them years later, in my home. It was probably 4 x 8 feet and had a gorgeous scene of a camel caravan and oasis in mustardy yellows and verdant teals which went with our colorful accent tiles on the fireplace. So for once, I actually liked a "treasure" and liked it even after I was unable to attain cool status in college.

Strange things started to occur, loss of employment, bad health, huge family fights. It seemed my husband and I had found ourselves a streak of bad luck we couldn't shake off. We just kept getting into predicaments, enough that it was comical if you had that dark of humor...but to us it wasn't funny.

On a spring cleaning frenzy, I took the tapestry off to clean the wall behind it and my husband suggested something absurd. "Get rid of the tapestry. I figured it out. Our bad luck....it...the tapestry has bad mojo". I am one who does believe in the possibility of the supernatural, so a tapestry with negative energy seemed both uproarious and a real possibility. So I had mixed emotions as I put the beautiful but possessed art into the garbage bin. But you know what? Our luck really did seem to turn around after we got rid of the tapestry. Coincidence? I don't know.

So yesterday my mom calls me because my grandma has a tapestry for me; my mom having noticed I must have "tired of that tapestry on the wall and put it away". This one was to match our decor even better, she said.

So I didn't quite have the heart to say I trashed it, but I also didn't want more tapestries to clutter up my house or God forbid have bad luck attached to them. So I fibbed and said, "nah...I do not want another tapestry. That one we had, had bad energy so we put it out for free in the yard with some other things."

She about lost her cool. "You whaaaaaaat?" She yelled "Ypu gave it away? For free? That was worth thousands of dollars!"(just like the $400 cook book sold on Amazon for $35...) she kind of growled under her breath and continued, "you should have sold it on eBay or given it back to me. I can't believe you. I am hesitant to ever give you a damned thing again. I can't believe you." I tried to justify it, that I would feel immoral selling someone something with bad energy, but she seemed to not care if the tapestry might cause one to kill small kittens, it was worth thousands!!!