The Reindeer Keeper

  Old cupboards, like two of mine I am featuring in this Post, have always intrigued me. With drawers and shelves and files, they offer so many options for storing stuff, displaying stuff and hiding stuff. Better yet, stories of long ago are in the drawers, on the shelves and in those files. You just have to listen. And when it is Christmastime, those old cupboards become even more intriguing once they are dressed in twinkling lights or Santas or fresh greenery, candy canes, old crocks, Holiday art and decorations.  I stumbled upon the smaller cupboard at a place opening up several years ago. They were taking items on consignment. At that time, I was just beginning to dabble in art, using mostly markers and having no clue what I was doing. Looking back, I am so glad I went. While the owner did end up taking a few of my pieces, it was a simple cupboard off in a corner that made my day. Of all the stuff in that place, I felt that little cupboard was mine even before I took a clo...

I never knew a lot of the little things my grandmother had on display in her home could have been collectively referred to as knick knacks. In fact, growing up, I never heard that term used for anything. All those things sitting here and there, on tables and book shelves and shelves inside cabinets with glass doors and on window sills and in plants and on the mantel above the fireplace in the living room and sitting on antiques and on top of starched doilies and on little wooden steps of a wooden crescent moon serving as a display as it hung on a wall weren't just things. They were my grandmother's things and each one of them was considered to be a treasure by those of us who loved her. Each one had a story all its own. When walking through her front door, those knick knacks were there to welcome you back. They never called in sick due to the weather. You knew where each one sat day after day. They added  to the scenery; to the warmth of that home. They were a part of that ...

It was the Christmas when I was seven that I found a desk under the tree with my name on it. I’d smelled the shellac when hurrying down the front stairs. I didn’t know what it was until I was told my grandfather used something called shellac when making the desk out of pine. It had two shelves on the right side and a single drawer in the front. When I opened the drawer I found a pad of lined paper with a No. 2 sharpened, yellow pencil. From that moment on I considered desks to be magical. My best friend back then was an only child. I loved running through our side yard to go play with her. Once inside the pale yellow house with a back stairway that took us up to her bedroom, we spent time not only in her room but spare rooms full of stuff as well. Going from one room to another we’d have to walk by a desk sitting in a nook all by itself. It was my friend’s desk. It was a roll top desk and whenever I could, I’d sit in the chair and pull the top back and be taken away by the ...

When I was in my early teens my parents added a room on to our home out in the country. That space would become my mother's fabric shop where she eventually sold not only fabrics of all sorts but everything else needed for the sewing process including patterns, zippers, bias tape, buttons-even hat forms and feathers and jewels to decorate one's hat creations. My mother had the shop decorated in fine antiques, providing warm and inviting displays for the bolts of fabric in season at the time. On Saturday mornings my grandmother offered sewing classes. She and my mother were fine seamstresses. That's where I learned how to sew although I never reached their level of craftsmanship.I loved that fabric shop. It provided me endless hours of imaginative play when the closed sign was on the door. Recently when involved in a home renovation I came across what had been a focal point of my mother's fabric shop-a small, antique, hand-painted, working sewing machine whic...