I made this piece in Mariah Fee’s Collage class at the Parson’s School of Design in the Fall of 2008 and the first half of the title was given to me by my friend, the artist Peggy Fussell. I have long loved the Morton’s Salt Girl and her absent mindedness, which remind me of trips to the store that I was induced to take on my mother or sister’s behalf—often, in my sister’s case, to get cigarettes for her. (I’d carry her note and ID and the cashiers at Cumberland Farms never questioned my intentions; my sister bribed me with Funny Bones.)

The slogan “When it rains, it pours” always struck me as funny as a commentary on life, and the little galoshes-less girl ambling through the rain seems unperturbed by what life is throwing at her. I also loved the idea of the salt as instead being a trail of gunpowder she leaves behind her—the whole blast ruined by the rain.

When I showed the collage to my husband, he asked if I had intended to make it so that she was walking on a river, but I hadn’t. I’d just fallen in love with using tissue paper in collages and the pastel-like softness that the paper lends to a collage. Maybe she needs a river? She definitely needs some galoshes. Perhaps in another collage.