Tuesday Treasure #20 - The Bench

Move day was yesterday.  Today I'm back at the house cleaning for the new owners in preparation for their walkthrough before settlement.  Here's a look back at an old post with special memories.

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This post first appeared in December 2008.  My Mom was still alive and a widow for just one year.  The post was written just before her 90th birthday.  She lived until almost her 95th birthday.

Joining Tuesday Treasure.

The Bench

(December 5, 2008)

Almost two years ago Dan and I took a woodworking course. It was a lot of fun and I made some nice things. Afterward I helped Dan make tables for our shop. I also promised Emily a deacon's bench for her house. That was the summer of 2007. She found plans for me, I purchased them, and then filed them away.

Last summer Dan encouraged me to take the plans out and order the wood. We bought some very nice oak instead of the pine it called for. In reading through the plans we both realized I had not done enough woodworking to tackle the project on my own so I gratefully became the assistant to him.

We presented the bench to Emily and Matt at Thanksgiving and they took it home in their car.


It is a very special present because it was made by us and it was hand-painted by my mom, Emily's grandmother, who will be 90 years old on Sunday.


Before we did the final finishing of the bench, we repaired, sanded and refinished an oak antique table I had purchased for use on the porch. We realized it had been made by someone from pieces of wood they had around and we wondered about its history. So no one would wonder about the history of the bench 50, 75, or 100+ years from now we burned on the bottom who it was made for, when, and by whom plus we added who did the painting. (Sorry we didn't take a picture of that part.) We know it will be an antique for someone, hopefully a descendant of this family, one day.

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2016 Footnote:  The bench still resides at Emily and Matt's home in New Hampshire.  I have a lovely photo of my granddaughter sitting on it.

The referenced antique oak table has gone to ReStore for someone else to use.

A Conglomerate of Unrelated Observations

I. Amish Paste
First of the Amish paste tomatoes harvested at 5 o'clock. Yum!

II. Fragrance

The stargazer and white lilies are in bloom and the fragrance is extraordinary in my perennial garden. Each stalk is loaded with blooms so this display will be around for quite awhile.

III. Refrigerator Pickles

The pickle jar is filled to the maximum. The cucumbers are being transformed into pickles. I've been sampling them every couple of days. After the first sampling I had to add more sugar because I had put in too much salt. Only half of the last cucumber would fit so the rest of that one was eaten for lunch. There are more cucumbers to be picked ~ how do they grow so fast overnight? ~ and another refrigerator pickle recipe to try.

IV. The Culprit
Here it is, the bunny eating my plants. We sat at the dinner table last night and watched it munch away on the remaining impatiens. Fortunately for this rabbit I wasn't able to move all the impatiens to pots out of its reach. It has enjoyed them and now there are hardly any left for it to eat.

After eating it ambled over to this spot of grass and stretched out. It had its eye on us the whole time so we finally decided to get the camera and take its picture. My zoom isn't the best and I did crop the photo to enlarge it, but you can get a sense of how relaxed this critter is.

V. A Good Book
I do a lot of reading, some good books, some okay books. Terrible ones, I don't bother to finish. I finished a good book this weekend: "Prayers for Sale" by Sandra Dallas. Set in the midst of the Depression in the Rocky Mountains' gold country of Colorado, it is the story of a friendship between two women, one 86 years old and one 17 years old. They have quilting and sorrows in common and the friendship builds from that. The older one is a story teller so you're taken back to the Civil War and events that transpired then. It was a lovely read all the way through. I'll look for other books by this author next time I'm at the library.

Have You Noticed?

Have you noticed that a three letter word in our language is being used less and less often?

I listen to a variety of shows on National Public Radio and enjoy some of the political discussions on Diane Rehm and Talk of the Nation. NPR and some of the local public radio shows give me a chance to learn about new books as authors are interviewed; some of which I add to my book list for the next trip to the library. There's a treasure trove of listening out there, but I have come to realize that "absolutely" and "exactly" are the new words for a simple "yes". Have you noticed? Why is that?

"Yes" is a perfectly good word. It means "to give an affirmative response". By not responding with a yes, and using "absolutely" you have to wonder if there has been so much fudging of facts and equivocating with responses that yes has lost its true meaning. To make sure that they are understood, someone being interviewed has to show they are truthful (though they may not be) by saying "absolutely" where "yes" should have been sufficient. Do they think they sound more intelligent with their choice of a longer word where the three letter word was perfectly fine for an answer? A concise, simple response is always better. Let's get back to using "yes". Don't you agree? (I hope you said yes!)

Apple Pie

I decided to take a page from my daughter's blog Greens and Jeans and post pictures of the apple pies I made.

Two of them I took to a dinner gathering of some people from church. They were a hit. One gentleman even asked that I make them for the church auction in the spring. The third pie is for dinner this afternoon.

School

I'm back at school for another year. I'd much rather be in my garden or on my porch reading a book. There's a flowering plant in my wetlands that I want to examine more closely, photograph and post here. I won't have time for any of that until the weekend now that school has started again.

Butterflies are Back!

I guess I've just been too impatient. The butterflies have slowly been appearing. What has kept them for so long? I know they were here earlier last summer.