The Reindeer Keeper

Growing up in the country there are places that become favorite places when you are young and playing and pretending with friends throughout the year. And when the seasons change, the play changes as well. I did most of my playing with my cousins. Mainly, my cousin Carol.  I've written about my grandfather's barn with two large haylofts connected by a wooden bridge and the empty chicken roosts empty because my grandfather had to close down his farm due to asthma. I've gone on and on about the chicken coop void of chickens, cleaned out, then filled with the remains of a closed one-room schoolhouse up the road. Those remains included the books, desks and chalkboards. Students were being bussed to nearby public schools. That happened before my parents moved us to the country. (Us meaning my sister, my brother and me).  The chicken coop void of chickens and filled with the remains of the one-room schoolhouse is where I would play with my cousins most days after school, on the w...

  I loved playing TEA PARTY when I was a little girl. Most of the time they were tea parties with pretend friends I named Chunny and Winnie. Our tea parties were always held in the summertime, on an enclosed back porch where the sun and a nice breeze came through the screened windows. My favorite dolls and stuffed animals would join us. They loved being served pretend chocolate chip cookies. So did Chunny and Winnie. So, did I. I wish I had photos of those tea parties, but I don't. There were no cell phones way back then. That's why I was so excited when finding the above photo of another Tea Party, not with Chunny and Winnie but with my cousin Carol and my older brother, Johnny. The tea party was held just outside my grandparents' farmhouse. If you look above my cousin, you can see a bit of my grandfather's barn. At that time, the barn was home to cows, horses and chickens. When we were older, we played up in the hay mows in the barn and in our grandfather's nearby...

When my grandparents lived in their farmhouse, many times during the winter my grandfather worked on projects in the kitchen. In the evening he’d shut the door leading to the dining room and get busy. He’d do it all in that kitchen-from sawing to nailing to finishing. The end results became keepsakes to those lucky enough to be given one. I’ve written before about the pine desk my grandfather made me. I fell in love with it the first time I saw it on Christmas morning when I was 8 years old. Smelling of shellac, it came with a stool and a single drawer. Inside that drawer was a pad of paper with a sharpened #2 pencil. My mother was another recipient of one of my grandfather’s wooden heirlooms. Hers was a bookcase made of pine with three shelves. The bookcase was the perfect gift for my mother as she was an avid reader. Her favorite books were mostly novels set in the South during the Civil War; the era of Rhett and Scarlett and big hoop dresses and sprawling plantations. I re...