“I reached the mountain’s top with tears in my eyes”, she said. Her legs were shaking. She reached the top around 11:00 AM, took her hat off and laid in the ground out of exhaustion. All the men who were at the top already, when they saw her they started to clap because she was the first woman of the day.
For my Studio Bridge #2 assignment, we had to design an illuminated manuscript page that combined an aspect of a previous interview to our parents, about a specific memory from when they were our age, and a drawing which would then be incorporated within that page. The interview was assigned for a project in my Seminar class.
When I interviewed my mom about a memory she had when she was my age, she told me of the time she climbed a volcano, the Popocatépetl, in Mexico. When she was about to reach the top, she was so exhausted by then that she thought she wasn’t going to make it. She pushed through, and with tears in her eyes, she got to the top. At the top when she took her hat off, all the men who were already there started to clap at her. She was the first woman who reached the summit that day.
This is the part of the story that I like the most when she got to the top. In my illuminated manuscript I wanted to show the moment in which she took her hat off, with the mountains as background. That image is encapsulated in a half moon and sun, which represents the journey of my mom. Because when she started climbing the mountain it was 4 AM, when she reached the top around 11 AM, and when she descended it was the afternoon.
