The Reindeer Keeper

In early November, I received a Christmas gift from a cousin I spent most every day with when growing up out in the country in that row of four houses filled with relatives. The gift came in a large manila envelope. Inside there was a Christmas card with copies of what started out as an idea we had and turned into a ‘family newspaper’. I don’t know how old we were when we had the idea of ‘publishing’ a family newspaper but it didn’t take long before the idea turned into a reality. We called our newspaper the ‘Burns Row Journal’—named after our grandparents. We decided it would be a weekly. Starting out, we’d charge five cents a copy. Every Saturday night, the ‘presses’ were rolling, meaning we sat down and hand-printed four copies of our newspaper. Delivery was always Sunday morning to each of the four houses. While the first copies of ‘The Journal’ were small, content quickly grew to offer our readers more than just news, which was a combination of family news and national ne...

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...