This weekend wasn’t one bit suited to outdoor gardening, but last weekend was. I bought those flats of pansies and, after carrying them as well as several very heavy bags of compost and peat from my garage to my back yard (no really–it seems like 75% of gardening consists of carrying heavy stuff around), I returned to my garage one last time to gather up my gardening gloves and my trowel.
The trowel, I’m sorry to say, seems to have absconded itself over the winter. I searched high, I searched low. It isn’t on any of the garage shelves. It isn’t in my tool box. It isn’t on or under the back deck. It simply isn’t anywhere. Alas. I dug up the tiny holes for the pansies with my fingers (after all, that’s why God invented nail brushes) and bought a new trowel the next time I went to the garden center.
What I did find while searching my garage shelves was a single cardboard packing box… with stuff in it. I had no idea what could be there, which is astonishing, given that I’ve only lived in this house for eight months. I peeked in and saw… china. And glass. Goodness.
These are pieces of china that have lived in my mother’s china cabinet since time immemorial. You may remember that my parents also moved house this summer, and got rid of really an awful lot of stuff. They must have brought this box on one of their visits, and deposited it on that garage shelf. Did they tell me they had? Did they intend to bring it in later? I don’t know. But I had some serious antiques sitting out there, these few months.
Most of these pieces don’t have notes with them. The pink glass candy dish is Depression glass, I know.The salt and pepper shakers come from the same great-great-aunt who gave me a toy creamer (fantastic lady, aunt Madge, incidentally. Had rheumatic fever and polio less than a year apart and had to learn to walk again; never married; was a newspaper reporter, living alone in downtown Indianapolis… pretty gutsy for a lady born circa 1900). The lovely gilt dish with roses is a complete mystery.
And this ironstone plate, so the note says, belonged to a grandmother, though I don’t know how many greats should be attached to her. Between two and three, anyway. The pattern is of bleeding hearts and seems to have been hand-painted.
So the little collection of elegant clutter atop my dresser has been augment. Everything looks so pretty–I quite like it. It’s wonderful that it mostly has meaning and memories, too.
Though some of it is just pretty trinkets I picked up on eBay.
Pudding has opinions about what, or who, the real treasure around here is.
