Somehow, the truck driver managed to place the dumpster near the shed. I watched (in horror) from the house because I knew he was going to put ruts in the lawn. He did. Large ones. On the other hand, it’s a heck of a lot easier to load things into the dumpster that way.
I think I’ll be hiding when he comes to pick it up. I’ll leave that to Don.
We cleared out at least a third of the shed, maybe closer to half. We’re really sore today so we’re taking the day off and then we’ll be back at it tomorrow. It’s very satisfying! Moldy books (heartbreaking, but true) – gone. Old paperwork – gone. Crap, broken chairs, rakes, old computers – gone. Old, broken down lawnmowers and air conditioners – gone. It’s fabulous!
I did go through some boxes that were marked ‘pottery.’ I knew these two figurines were in the shed somewhere and it turns out, they were near the front of the shed. Had I only known!
Wrapped up for more than 30 years, they were in perfect condition. My grandmother had these on her mantel and I loved them when I was a little kid – I was entranced by them. I remember staring at them every time we visited. They had been my great-grandmother’s. Years later, when Grandma was packing up her house in order to move in with my parents, she gave them to me. I was off on grad school and teaching adventures, living in tiny apartments, so they remained safely tucked away in a box. So glad I found them yesterday because losing them somehow in the clearing of the shed was unthinkable. Aren’t they lovely? They have to be at least 120 years old, most likely much older. They’re made of bisque.
I also rediscovered this, which had been in Gram’s china cabinet.
A little demitasse cup.
And we found some of our favorite framed artwork, which, it turns out, had been just inside the door all this time. I’ll share it with you as we clean it up, but one of our favorites was brought inside yesterday.
We bought this poster at Lake Louise many years ago, 21, to be exact. Don had been acting in a show in Calgary and we took a trip to Banff and Lake Louise on his days off. We stayed at the Fairmount Chateau Lake Louise to celebrate our first wedding anniversary – in the bridal suite. This reprint of a vintage Canadian Pacific advertisement stole my heart with all its 1920s details, captured from the interior of the same hotel in which we were staying. We had it framed in San Diego. I love it. It’s like seeing an old friend again.
Since I unpacked my great-grandmother’s china a couple of years ago and unpacked her figurines yesterday – all of which were on display in the family farmhouse in Orillia, Ontario – I thought this placement in the china cabinet was fitting.
Makes all the sore muscles worthwhile!
I cannot say enough about The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. We finished it last night. It is impeccably done. Set design, costumes, the incredible period detail, the acting, the story – all of it is excellent. If you haven’t seen it yet, I urge you to. I’m still thinking about it today and we’re already making plans to watch it again in the near future.
But first, the new season of The Crown.
Stay safe.
Happy Tuesday.
Sounds like you accomplished a lot on the shed. How wonderful that your treasures were found in such good shape!
I love the figurines…in their rightful home at last.
I have a few treasures from my mom and beloved aunts that I have kept and use and they make me happy.
I started the new season of The Crown as well. I think Diana is not quite right but it must have been so difficult to cast.
Take care
I haven’t watched it yet, but I remember thinking she didn’t really have the right look.
Stay safe, Marilyn.
I loved The Queen’s Gambit! I finished the series two nights ago. I did not want it to end! I too will watch it again soon. Organizing is so liberating. It always feels like a weight has been lifted off of you. Not to mention finding treasures you forgot you had. Have a good one, Claudia.
Thank you, April!
Stay safe.
I love your Lake Louise poster. Shortly after my husband and I married we accepted a one year temporary assignment to work in Calgary. This was in the late 1990’s. As often as possible, we made the drive to Banff and Lake Louise to explore and marvel at the scenery. So many good memories.
Also, congratulations on the progress on the shed. I always feel so much better when my possessions are streamlined and organized and I know where things are!
It’s so beautiful there!
I have a feeling I’ll be doing even more organizing during the winter, Cindy.
Stay safe.
You did indeed find treasures. Your great-grandmother’s figurines are lovely…as is the print from Canada. Great additions to your home. I’m anxious to see your other treasures, soon as you get them cleaned up.
You certainly earned a day rest…almost looks like your dumpster is already filled up. Stay safe! ;)
Nah, Don packed the far end first. We have plenty of room!
Stay safe, Donna.
It feels so good to get so much done. Finding treasures makes the work even easier. Love the figurines and teacup. That art is amazing. I went to a free garage sale and found a wonderful train print framed and gave it to Sara’s family. It hangs in their dining room. Fun things to cherish. I loved ‘The Queens Gambit’ and will like you watch it again. I’m watching ‘The Crown’ now and I agree with another who said Diana is not quite right but I get the spirit of her. How difficult it was for her and Charles to be in a marriage neither were ready for. Hope you enjoy your day of rest.
I’m looking forward to starting The Crown tonight, Linda.
Stay safe.
What treasures! These are beautiful and I’m so glad you found them, that they didn’t make their way into a “bad” pile. I would have been entranced by the figurines, too, and the poster is one of the loveliest I’ve seen. Sounds like good work, hard work. And well done. Is there any room left in the dumpster for the next two thirds?!
Don packed the far end first. There’s plenty of room.
Stay safe, Jeanie.
congratulations on all that progress you and don made (in just one day) on a seriously big task! and on finding some beloved and very sweet family heirlooms and anniversary art!
i am a very sentimental person so it is hard for me to be ruthless when sorting through things … making that a slow chore about which i easily procrastinate! i remind myself to store treasures in Heaven (and i envision Heaven has, in part, all our favorite things), but sometimes that is still so hard for me! i also know God wants us to have the delights of our hearts and to enjoy good things in this earthly life. that is why i still have some bins of extra-sentimental things to go through. :) i keep at it, though, because i don’t want to leave a bigger task for my family (i also have a list of my stuff that tells the story behind those things … in case that makes the sorting easier for them, too). and if there are things they can enjoy now, good … that is where i can get more enjoyment!
anyway, congrats again. and i hope you and don are feeling better and taking it easy today!
kathy in iowa
It’s difficult for me, also, but I don’t want my sister to be saddled with a task as monumental as this one is. I tossed photographs that I hadn’t missed, all sorts of things! If I haven’t really missed them in the 15 years we’ve lived here, I don’t need them. I wonder if I’ll ever get that way about all my collections??
Stay safe, Kathy.
I have that same poster! My husband was there on business in 1999 and I tagged along. Staying at The Chateau Lake Louise was like a dream. We canoed across the lake and looked out the same window that’s in the poster. Ours is a bit different in that it has a very elegantly dressed couple gazing out the window (I always thought they were heading out to dinner:))and ours is mostly painted in blues. I couldn’t wait to get home to get it framed. We never put it up after downsizing several years ago but I’m going to find a place for it now for sure. I’m so glad you didn’t wait for spring to clean out that shed!
We cleaned up the other framed posters today – or sort of cleaned them up. Now we have to figure out where to hang them. But that’s for another day.
That hotel is something else, isn’t it?
Stay safe, Deb.
It seems the Universe knew best and sent that dumpster when it was needed ~ yet perhaps not yet wanted. By doing so you have some joy to celebrate. Those figurines are beautiful. What are they grasping? Are they little table top tennis racquets?? The picture is beautiful as well. Maybe there will be more treasures tomorrow! Glad you took a day to rest. Take care!
Little tennis rackets and a he’s holding a large ball.
Thanks, Chris.
Stay safe.
Well, that’s already a full dumpster; good job. You’re lucky you can throw everything in together. Here, where I am in SoCalif, you have to have a separate drop off for electronics like computers and air conditioners; it’s a real pain.
Your bisque duo is really lovely; precious.
I have had a challenging three days. I worried on Saturday afternoon that my elderly yard cat might be ailing; too lethargic. Then, on Sunday, I talked to someone on the phone who continually called Trump the ‘President of Death’ which somehow sunk in with me and I couldn’t shake it out of my mind although even I said many months ago that he had blood on his hands with the epidemic. But then add on to this the ever-present nighttime news shows on TV with so much alarming news of escalating Covid deaths, too. Leaves a person so unsettled, right? We want to hear about life, not death.
To then discover via my husband thru his local social media that, on Friday, a childhood/school friend of mine died. He’s a family doctor in town and widely known in the area; in the same clinic as my own family physician. I didn’t believe it at first and thought it was some kind of strange joke or rumor, but then I got in touch with a mutual friend of ours on Sunday afternoon and he confirmed it (no details known yet; not an accident, though, nor Covid); so, a kind of shock and of course by now the tributes are pouring in on our high school graduating class website. (He was brilliant; a National Merit scholar, ranked either one or number two at the top of our senior class of 200 [small school; small town].) Goes back to nursery school/preschool with me and him, then the same piano teacher, Sunday School but also regular school and me a flag twirler with him marching behind in the band. Youthful times indelible in the brain.
And yesterday, Monday, back to the cat, she of the wild and the grass and the trees, feral but who somehow got named by me and would come when I called her, and who I got close enough to (in terms of trust), the one and only time, to be able to humanely trap her for spaying and who always made sure for 13 long years that she had food, water and outside warming shelters if she needed them in colder weather; well, she presented herself to us in the later afternoon, one very sick girl. No energy to keep her head up. I knew this day was coming due to her age. But you’re never ready, not really.
We scurried to find a misplaced cat carrier, speaking between us how we could do this because it would be traumatizing at any time for her to be ‘caught’ and no humans ever handle her but she clearly needed immediate medical attention. In between, she moved and we found her in another section of the yard, flat on her side and I called to my husband that she had expired, yet she hadn’t; one eye moved. When my husband was banging around in a shed looking for that darn carrier, it bothered her so she managed to pull herself up and go UNDER the shed. By now, the minutes had ticked by and the veterinarian’s office was closing in 15 minutes and the sun had set. I’m bawling, my husband’s bawling; we tried to devise a method of how we could get her out from under the shed if we set up lights and could drag her out, again how upsetting to her if she was in fact dying, which seemed to be the case.
All along, in this very fast hour, she had been so still and quiet. We backed off, came into the house to try to reassess. Went back out and she was half under, half out from underneath the shed, and now truly gone, her head resting on her little paws. In the final, permanent sleep. So, it wasn’t violent, she wasn’t contorted in pain or anything; I don’t know if it was just ‘her time’ but she could have been anywhere between age 13 and 19 for all I know. Very unusual to live to that age as a feral cat with an always-outdoor life away from a domestic/human environment; a kitty who I could never immunize or try to do pest control for, and part of an old colony on the hillside which had rampant mange, leukemia and kitty-AIDS (even predators) from which she had stood apart once I entered the picture but still with one foot in the outside/wild world and a toe into that domestic side with a reliability on humans for sustenance; how did she survive for so long, though, still in an otherwise harsh surrounding of outdoor, not indoor. Without human intervention, feral cats, according to one of our veterinarians, don’t live much more than 17 months from birth.
Anyway, we buried her on the hill behind our house this morning; she’s in her domain, in the surroundings she knew. And I’m done for the day; I’m wiped. So is my husband who was as involved as I was (she was never a pet per se, yet a daily presence in our lives for a long time; you don’t get over this right away; it’s still a lot of heartache). But too much death in our own small world over these past 72 hours. No sleep of course; too upset. Maybe tomorrow will be better. I’ll know more about my friend from childhood. Our state locked down further today to try to control the virus better, so maybe less people will die.
And I’m just glad the kitty didn’t slink off somewhere; she felt safe in the shelter of our/her big back yard which backs up to the somewhat-undisturbed four acres behind us from where she first came to us. If she hadn’t died here in the yard, I would have been nuts wondering what had happened. It was something I always worried about, since she was such a wild soul. I couldn’t stand to think of her in any kind of pain but my husband really felt that she didn’t exhibit symptoms of pain (yet how could we know; we’re not veterinarians) and that, again, it was a somewhat-quick descent right at the end; a quiet, rather peaceful ending to her long feral-feline life. But I’m sad. So sad. My husband said, ‘She came to us to say goodbye at the end.’
And now her ‘baby’, her adult kitten who’s age 12 and who has never not been by her side for the whole of his life (she would still groom him as her baby even though he’s also an old cat himself now; we got him neutered when we had another/rare OTO opportunity although he was awfully young at the time, so he’s never been a fighter or a roamer but always Mama’s Boy); well, he’s just … lost, without her; already. He hasn’t eaten and he did a lot of odd meowing last night whereas feral cats rarely meow; he was there for everything that went down yesterday, so he instinctively knew. Don’t tell me for a minute that cats and dogs who have their feline companions and canine companions don’t grieve when they’re left alone. I’ve witnessed it too many times, and now Mama’s Boy is going to have a hard time with this; poor guy. I don’t expect him to survive long without her.
But I’m sorry I keep talking about it. There’s a certain amount of this that I must just let go. My friend led a worthy life although he’s gone from us too soon. The country will get a vaccine and Covid deaths will decrease. The President of Death will have to leave in January. My little mama cat is gone but she really did get to live out the ‘length’ of her life to old age. Although I’d put myself in a situation hard to control with her, to help her the way I would have liked to, she was a good mommy and a constant in my daily life that I apparently needed. She helped me a little; I helped her a little. I just wish I could have ever petted her and loved on her or been able to hold her, but it’s hard to take a wild thing and try to tame what can’t be tamed.
Will try to sleep tonight. We’ll go to the beach tomorrow. It always helps. My husband’s not made of stone and this was hard on him, too. We need to walk on the sand and untie the knots. I’m struggling to come up with anything good about the year 2020, which I’ll be glad to put behind me come January 1.
Not a full dumpster, only the part closest to the camera is full. Don is packing it. We’re not recycling, we’re dumping. Dumping is a whole other thing. I’m not sure where they’re taking everything, but I’m thrilled I don’t have to sort through it. I know that’s not very environmentally conscious, but we are good recyclers 98% of the time.
I’m so sorry for your losses, Vicki. Heartbreaking, whether animal or human – to me, they’re the same. I’m glad you could bury her and help her in her time of need. And I’m so sorry about your friend.
Take care and let yourself grieve.
Stay safe.
Thanks, Claudia. I appreciate the support and that you allowed me to ‘talk’.
xo
oh, vicki …
so sorry for those losses! hope you can take it easy, do things you enjoy today (and every day)!
i, too, think your mama-cat came to tell you and your husband “thanks. see you later”. i think she knew and knows you two helped her a great deal, that she could trust you, especially at such a bittersweet time. and i pray that you see mama’s boy soon and can not only help him, but also hopefully pet him and feel reassured that he knows you and your husband are good people and a source of help and comfort.
take good care of yourselves, too, and stay safe!
kathy in iowa
… thank you so much, sweet kathy in iowa; I’ve tried to distract myself but I cry all day over her and it’s really hard to go out back and not have her around; I’m trying to give some extra attention to the adult kitten of hers, but he’s so freaked out that he’s still not eating and twice yesterday, he just RAN from me and dove into the other yard thru the little crawl holes we purposely put into the fence so that none of these feral cats ever feel they’re trapped; the problem is, for him, that he’s wild yet not because he’s always been fed by a human and he’s very accustomed to me and my husband although, unless it’s feeding time, you still really can never get but about three feet in distance from him; but I guess my point is with him that I’ve always been extra worried for him knowing that if I didn’t keep up with his food and water, he couldn’t find food on his own, as in hunt (he just doesn’t know how and is also too old now), unless he scoped out other cat-friendly neighbors who set out food (the cats all seem to have a telegraph of who are the cat ladies); thing is, he doesn’t wander; he always stays put; he doesn’t explore…and Mama was his sole entertainment and leader/guide; I know I have to let nature take its course but I’ve always been concerned he could never be parted from his mom, even knowing the day would likely come; they were just too bonded to one another; frankly despite their diff in age, which I don’t think was probably too much, I’d always hoped he’d die before she did; with Mama, I knew she could survive anything because she just had a certain canny/savvy instinct about her that he doesn’t; she was his whole world and he did whatever she did; oh well … thanks again for caring as I’ve spilled my guts yet again on Claudia’s blog … your words mean a lot to me …
hej, vicki …
i pray that mama’s boy will stay near you and your husband with your big, kind hearts and offerings of food, water and shelter.
might your veterinarian neighbor have some ideas to help draw him in a bit?
thank you for helping mama’s boy and his mama. may God bless you all.
and stay safe!
kathy in iowa
ps: loved reading on claudia’s blog about your childhood experiences … there might be some different (regional) brands, but we have a lot of similarities.
kathy in iowa
…you have a good idea, kathy; I’ll talk to the vet and I’ll also talk to my almost-veterinarian neighbor about it…thanks again for weighing in…you lose a cat in my environment and another appears; so, who knows, somebody might show up that’s new to bond with, even though I fear my Mama’s Boy can’t bond with anybody but Mama…
…I find I’m keyboarding nervously and over-chatting because I’m an emotionally-fragile mess right now (I need sleep); but, yes, I love to reminisce these days, which I fear is a sign of me becoming ‘an old person’ but I also think it’s comforting to remember a world where we might have felt more secure (even happier)…yet how much of that is illusion…
…we didn’t get out today as planned, so I know with a few lingering (safe) errands tomorrow and getting over to the beach, I’ll feel better, with clean ‘air’ in my lungs and oxygen to my brain…
Vicki, I hope you see my reply. I am so sorry about the death of your friend and Mama Kitty. Both so heartbreaking. Thank you for taking care of Mama Kitty for all those years. I’m glad she went peacefully and that she had a proper burial. I have two cats – a mama kitty (Clementine) who showed up on our doorstep years ago. She gave birth here in our house and only had two kittens. One was stillborn. We have her surviving baby; her son (Monkey). Clementine is now estimated to be between 11-12 years old. She has kidney disease and a chronic skin condition. She’s receiving treatment for both, but we know that cats with kidney disease don’t live long. It will not only be heartbreaking to lose her, but I’m afraid of how Monkey will do once his mama is gone.
We lost our senior kitty two years ago and both Clementine and Monkey grieved. It was obvious. They both were just “off”. They’d sleep in the chair where Zippo always slept – which they’d never done before.
My husband lost his childhood best friend two weeks ago due to colon cancer. He was only 60 years old. So yes….a very tough year indeed. Take the time you need to grieve your losses and be gentle with yourself.
Melanie, thank you for your words and thoughts; you are so kind. I always enjoy reading your comments here on Claudia’s blog. I’ve especially always been interested in your comments about the ‘sensitive’ personality, elements of which I recognize in myself, good and bad.
I definitely have had a double whammy but then seeing the families on TV, their stories; or hearing about other families thru friends, who are losing sometimes multiple family members to Covid is just nothing we can pass over; this is affecting all of us. There’s so much heartbreak. A friend/former work associate of my husband has had to go to Montana from California to care for her two elderly parents, one of whom had a recent serious surgery that didn’t go well; of course they’re really-old people and can’t get out, so they need help. My husband’s friend was able to go and still work virtually from there, so she’ll be in Montana, for now, indefinitely. Covid is really bad there right now. She gave a tablet/i-pad to the ICU nurses so that they can use it to help family members connect with their loved ones when of course there can be no hospital visitors. The nurses told her they’re using it A LOT/too much.
Of course with my preoccupation about my childhood friend it’s also that it’s another hit of my own mortality. Each year with my graduating class of high school, we’re losing more people and that was even before Covid, yet we’re all still in our 60s which is just too young to have to ‘go’. I remember when we were all so young with our entire lives ahead of us; how can it be that we got to this age and are dying already. The march of time. But doesn’t it seem like a lot of us are just experiencing extra losses this year. Claudia has mentioned this as well. Our emotions are being over-taxed. The heart bleeds for too many who are hurting out there as well as in our own personal circles of acquaintances and loved ones.
Ah, you are indeed a fellow cat lover. AND a rescuer! I’m a major dog lover, but cats, over time, have wormed their way into my animal-loving heart. It’s hard for me to have cats indoors due to my asthma. My husband came with a cat when we married and the cat had to go outside (sleeping in a warm bed in the garage at night), which I felt badly about. But there’s been a whole succession of cats since and, once, things got too out of hand in this neighborhood of the feral cats (once probably barn cats) and I was feeding 12 but also quite regularly working with Animal Control to humanely trap/spay/neuter and check for disease. Little by little, with other neighbors doing the same thing, the old feral colony is all but gone after one hundred years.
Now, I’m down to this adult kitten who was never really part of the colony but I have one big orange cat from there who’s clearly a male and a warrior, extremely afraid of humans, I don’t know how he’s even alive because I’ve seen him, with binocs, when he’s been very wounded from fighting, yet he comes down to feed sometimes from the hillside and the densely-foliaged, few acres beyond, so I don’t know how that’s gonna pan out over time with him. He fought a lot with my most recent cat who I’d already spoken of a few weeks back who has wound up, luckily, at a rescue center, being treated for HIS skin condition and likely to be adopted by my neighbor who’s doing final work to be a veterinarian; she’ll keep him indoors or in this massive enclosure she has in her rear yard at the hill which is bordered by the kind of fencing they put in at golf courses so that stray balls don’t hit your car windshield (or your head if you’re a pedestrian); anyway, it’s more space that any one cat would ever need if, for some reason, he thrives better outdoors. I don’t think this orange cat is trappable; he has too many alternative food sources. This is so diff from if I just had alley cats/strays; when they’re feral, they’re elusive.
My feral mama kitty could have died because of untreated kidney disease but also from something like a tooth abscess or something; it’s the situation of ‘no control’ I have over animals in the wild like this, not really pets, yet still my responsibility and just a diff sort of ‘pet’. If it was my own domestic cat, they’d be seeing a vet regularly and you could try to get on top of these ailments. I feel so badly for homeless cats/ ‘wild’ cats out there who can’t get medical treatment when it’s needed. I just throw up my hands when I can’t do what I need to do for them when all I really CAN do is try to spay/neuter and feed; provide some shelter outdoors and hope they’ll use the shelters.
I enjoyed hearing about your own kitties. I don’t know that I’ll keep accumulating pets at my age now because I don’t want them to outlive me, although my husband says he really can’t live a life without a pet. My ‘final’ domestic cat died a couple/few years ago at age 19. He got access to ‘the world’ outside (small world around the house, with supervision in his very-old age) during the day but, again, in the attached garage at night; he did live indoors (the best place for any cat) for a year when we had neighbors who refused to corral a pit bull who killed neighborhood cats (I had to testify in county court about it, because he got one of my mother’s cats); my asthma took a bad turn, but it was NOT safe for him to be outside that year.
Can you believe that I had a neighbor who abandoned four outside cats to me when he moved? They were his wife’s interests, not his own; he wasn’t unkind but said it was impossible for him to take them with him when he became a widower. So, they lined up in my backyard and stared a hole thru my walls til I figured out what was going on and, I tell ya, when I found him eventually and called him on the phone about it, he got an earful from me, but at least I found out their names and their ages as much as he could remember. It had been a mama cat who came in from the wild into his backyard and presented some kittens. When I inherited them, Bulwinkle and his sister were both age 15 (and she was BLIND; the poor little thing; I was able to get them to the vet so I could assess their health; she was particularly vulnerable outdoors in that condition; she had been the runt of the litter and was a tiny, tiny little creature and we have big turkey vultures which could have swept down and gotten her; they did that with another neighbor’s pet rabbits, who’d she’d left loose on the grass for awhile [big mistake]).
I’ve had such wonderful kitties come down out of the hill to us in this neighborhood and it makes you wonder what were their backgrounds. One old-lady neighbor took on one who wasn’t feral; when she died, Mom took the cat; got it to the vet, only to find that it was MALE and not female. (The elderly lady passed, thinking it was a girl kitty!) One was a stunningly-pretty Maine coon cat, huge guy weighing 22 lbs once we started feeding him, and it took us two years to coax him into the garage at night; I had him in the house for that year, too. The first time he saw the human bed, he jumped on it as if to say, “I’ve missed this!” He’d known humans at some point because he surely knew about that bed. How did he get so traumatized; how was he lost? I guess we had him ten years; the vet thought he was about age 15 at time of his passing.
The floodgates are open and I need to stop talking about all of this now; I’ve overshared and taken up too much space on Claudia’s blog when other readers need to ‘talk’ too (and with fewer words), but I just want you to know that I really appreciate the healing words of you and kathy and Claudia when I needed them. I’m sorry about your husband’s childhood friend; I wish he and I didn’t have to be in the same ‘club’ of losing friends from our youth; it hurts. I’m glad in my recently-lost friend’s case that, despite a couple of marriages, he had the joy of children as well as the reward of being able to heal people as a doctor. And he could have been a physician anywhere, but he instead came back to his home town. In some of the tributes on our school website, classmates are speaking of the fact that he helped not only them with medical care but also their parents.
You are right. We all need to be gentle with ourselves right now due to too many stressors and worries. And just hope that 2021 is a better year for all.
Vicki, you should write a blog!
The extra sad thing about my husband’s friend’s death was that his wife, who was a friend of mine, took her life 11 years prior. Their kids were only 10 and 13 at the time. Now they’re in their early 20’s and both parents are gone. So heartbreaking.
Oh, I’m so sorry; such tragedy. It may well have taken an understandable but very damaging toll on him. I have three cousins who lost both parents (in their early 50s; the parents) when the young-adult kids were just in their earliest 20s and they all three became somewhat adrift having lost that anchor of their folks who they still relied upon for guidance and advice in their blossoming lives.
So both you and your husband have felt the losses of your married-to-each-other friends so deeply, and it’s never easy also when it comes so close to the holidays at this time of year.
I remember when it was in the news, that the actor Christopher Reeve died (he’d been paralyzed from that riding accident), leaving behind wife and young son. Then, not long after, this wife passed away as well and I think the boy was just a preteen, although she’d chosen and prepared for him to be raised by someone clearly important for him/her. My father-in-law lost his mom when he was only age 5 and these things leave so much questioning, regardless of circumstances, with young children who can’t quite understand any of it. Yes, as you said, heartbreaking. Take care.
Love the figurines !! so beautiful–perfect. I have a ‘Hoosier’ cabinet that was always in Mymaw’s kitchen which I treasure. about 30 some years ago, I began working to remove the many layers of paint (worked at least 10 yrs on removal!!) some I remembered — totally surprised no real damage to the wood. Have always wondered Why it was ever painted — it is a beautiful piece (I only put a sealer on it so the wonderful oak shows well. I know Mymaw got this cabinet in 1924 when she married, I am sure it was not painted at that time. love it. hope you/Don continue to be healthy/safe. p.s. hope you know what a ‘Hoosier’ cabinet is, LOL
Of course I know what a Hoosier cabinet is!! So happy you have renewed and restored it, Linda.
Stay safe.
I am glad you had a productive day and found a few treasures. Fun to have things from your childhood.
We are enjoying The Queen’s Gambit based on your recommendation. Next is the Crown. At least we have something to look forward to.
Keep up the hard work.
Will do!
Stay safe, Kay.
Hello Claudia, I watched the fourth season of The Crown on Sunday, I took advantage of my break, a little disappointed in the fairy tale that looked more like the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, but I really liked it. My annual cleaning of the messy room here I finished on Saturday, tired but happy and fulfilled,
Good to hear from you, Edis!
Stay safe!
Oh happy days!! Who knew I’d be jealous of a dumpster!! How satisfying it must be to see stuff gone, but some heartbreak too along the way. Pieces of a life, or two, or three. Your grandmother’s figurines are charming! I was thinking the other day of getting rid of clutter and three pieces that I could see right from my bed were two of my grandmother’s teapots, and the globe of shells she picked up from the beach in Cuba waiting for me to be born. Those shells are at least 67 years old!! I wonder when I had those treasures why I thought I needed any other sort of meaningless decor. Of course, some of it isn’t meaningless, but most of it has no resonance. Congrats on your progress. (PS: the storm that came thru here had winds stronger than the ones I experienced in a hurricane in Newport decades ago–it was quite something. Glad you didn’t lose power or any more of your beloved tree.)
Thank goodness! The first thing I did was check the trees. It was insane out there.
Stay safe, Nora.