After the first few persimmons of the winter, I realized I had discovered a new material for unexpected still-lives: not only the deep orange fruit itself, lined up to ripen on my counter, but the flower-like stems became a wonder I found myself throwing into a bowl: ad hoc collection that looked like an exotic dogwood flower.

They are just one of a number of items we pare and throw away that if you look closely are little miracles of beauty.

All the instructions I read for cutting a persimmon said to cut them lengthwise through the stems. If you do that, you miss the most wondrous part: the star pattern that permeates the fruit’s very center: a tiny cosmos…

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…But it was that wondrous stem, swirled with subtle colors…

…that formed my odd collection…

They replaced the cracked duck egg shells I kept in a horn bowl for several months, their soft mottled gray lovely to look at…

…or the odd egg found in the woods or farmer’s market…more exotic than duck or chicken…the shell wonderful to look at…

Anka Gray uses egg shells as an art material…

The shells and the persimmon stems remind me of the wishbones Maria Robledo photographed in the hopes of getting people to contribute to the Wishbone Project, a monumental artwork her husband Holton Rower hopes to make.

She made endless compositions of the elemental forms (the unromantic leftovers from many roast chickens)

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