Object in Your Home Story (2-7-21)
Through the years friends would go away, being grabbed by human teenagers taken to meet their fates. I was pretty secure in my life and never worried that the same fate awaited
me.
Then one day, I skinny glasses clad girl reached up and pulled my halves off the shelf
declaring her “master piece” would be formed from mahogany...NOOOOOO I screamed, but oddly enough humans cannot hear the cries of wood and she just carried right along with her gruesome plans.
First, She had pushed my halves together after slathering on this slimy tacky stuff. Then there was pressure from all sides as she forces my halves into one. She clamped me together with the evilest looking contraptions ever made. I thought maybe that would be all i would have to suffer, she had left the shop and didn’t return for days.
My hopes were dashed to ribbons for the next thing I knew SHE was back and she took a wooden stick with a chunk of graphite crammed in the middle and pushed a shape onto my surface, i could feel the permanence for her work and it frightened me! it wasn’t’ all that fun ya know, having some creature etch a line in you. I never wanted this! It hurt and then a great fear welled in side my little wooden heart, what was next! What could this human do to me more?
The answer came the very next day. This girl, this monster took me to a loud scary machine that had a moving piece that was super scary. I cried and screamed and pleaded to no avail. She put me on the cold metal surface and pushed me toward the moving part, it hummed and buzzed and seemed to like the idea of me getting closer. Suddenly there was a searing pain, that thing brought back hidden and buried memories of a forest and men with similar things that sang as they cut me away from my roots...and then i was sliced from my brothers and sisters. We had all become the boards i now was. Oh the memories hurt nearly as much as this did! I could feel pieces of me being taken away and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop it!
the monster was relentless in her task of breaking me apart and cutting away at my soul. I could feel I was taking on a new form, a new shape, though curious, I was still in pain and the fear of losing part of me was nearly more than I could take. All at once the humming of the metal machine died and the pain dropped to a dull ache as she left of taking away bits of me.
How grateful for the respite, for after that she left me again for some time. I couldn’t tell you for sure how long, I was nursing the new wounds and the memories that had flooded back. I will say, it wasn’t a long enough break from the monsters grasp before she began her work on me once again.
This new instrument of torture made more of a soft buzzing sound and it sort of grated away little flecks at a time. The machine was kinder as it hummed a soothing song while sanding bits of me a way in dust sized particles. To be true, this did bring some relief to my ragged and shorn edges, and soon I was even enjoying the sensation. Maybe this human girl wasn’t quite the monster I thought her to be. I enjoyed this stage of transformation for a few days, she was more gentle than she had been and my fear began to subside.
After days of taking the once rough edges away she pulled out a bottle of strange red, stinky liquid and began brush my edges with it. It was wet and cold and added to the soothing of the past few days. I was beginning to desire to see what she had made of me, what had become of my once beautiful straight lines.
After as few days and a few layers of the red slimy stuff, she pulled out another container of liquid. This one was clear and when she methodically rubbed it into my surfaces, I could feel it sinking in and rejuvenating my dry layers. Oh, yes, this human wasn’t a monster...i wasn’t sure she was a friend by any means, but now that the torture had come to an end, i
could see she had a look of caring on her face as she worked on me. Coat after coat of the clear liquid “joy” was rubbed in until I felt like a new sapling.
Then one day a large human man what a joyous face told the girl her “hippo” was done and she could finally take it home! Hippo! What was a hippo and why would she be taking one home? Was she to leave me here in the shop, transformed and renewed? Then she lifted me, placed me in a cloth sack of sorts and began to move. Wait? Where was I going? What was going on? Was I to be fed to this Hippo? An unease took over and I began to think my new found and finally happy existence was soon to end. The trip in the bag lasted for what seemed like an eternity and it was bumpy and noisy and filled with my unease.
Finally, she took the carrying contraption I was in and set it on a hard surface! Oh my oh me oh no! What a way to go, I screamed in my head. Her hand closed around my edge and I came slowing to the surface. There was her face, smiling down at me with a look of joy and accomplishment. She handed me to a kindly looking lady and said, “ mom, look at the hippo cutting board I made! Mr Fred gave me an A! Isn’t it wonderful!”
From that day many many many, ok you get the picture, it has been a few years, I have spent my time in her life. She has used me and sometimes abused me...she even warped me once or twice, but she has loved me all along the way.
Ryanne Leavitt
The Family Heirloom
This dining room table is the only object that we have that cold be considered a family heirloom. My grandparents, I was told, bought it around 1920. I do not know if it were new or used. I am not sure which state they were living in when they bought it.
I think it came into our possession in 1965, after my grandmother died. Uncle Roy and grandfather came to visit us in Montana and I think they brought it with them.
Uncle Roy's other reason for coming to see us, was for me to take them to Yellowstone Park. Grandpa and Grandma had always wanted to go, but life never seemed to make an opportunity for them to get there. Uncle Roy decided that at least Grandpa was going to see it. (Also Uncle Roy wanted to take pictures.) I did not realize that I was going along as their chauffeur. Not only did I do the driving there, Uncle Roy Uncle Roy also wanted to go over Bear Tooth Pass, the highest pass between Wyoming and Montana. He got some good pictures and I got to drive down the other side in the middle of a snowstorm and road construction.
Back to the table, it spent many years being drug around the west with us, Tom Mt, to WA, to UT to ID and back. It's
Last move with us was to WA. Then in 1999 it was given to Ryanne & Aaron. It moved to Spokane and then to Warden. In 2017 it became ours again.
When Grandma and Grandpa had it, it was painted black. Daren stripped and refinished it, discovering the beautiful maple wood. That was not it's last sprucing up, Brandon & I sanded it and refinished it. We had never done anything like that, but we did a pretty good job. In 2017, Daren refinished it again. After several years of use, it was ready for another refurbishing. We really do not have much to leave behind for our kids, I have asked them to claim anything that catches their fancy.... Ryanne has claimed the table.
Myrna Flynn
Recently we placed a shelf in our kitchen and on that shelf we were finally able to unbox (after nearly 20 years) some very old bottles. If they could speak, I wonder what kinds of storied they could tell. My grandpa, Sam Booher, had a hobby of collecting bottles and items from ghost towns and dumps. I never had the opportunity to accompany him on these excursions. He had quite the collection of bottles, every window in his house was stacked with shelves for his bottles. Growing up, we had old bottles in our windows that he had given to our family. Grampa knew where he had gotten each bottle, what the bottles had been used for and about the year the bottle was from. He would love to tell you all about the adventures to find the bottles. He would rotate the bottles to get the best sunlight so they would purple up. After Grampa Sam died in 1990, someone boxed up a good portion of the bottles. Gramma’s intention was to make sure all the grandkids had the opportunity to pick some. Gramma was in the hospital in 1995. Cody and I went to stay with her for a few days after she was released. At that time, she asked me if there was anything I would like and suggested I go look through the bottles and pick however many I wanted. I told her I’d like Grampa’s card box and picked most of the bottles on that shelf. A few were sent to me by my cousin Jeff.
Carrie Keiser
A Souvenir On The Wall
In our house there is an object
Which came from far across the sea.
It hangs upon our entry wall
Displayed there for all to see.
It hangs below a plaque that reads
Flynn's established 1958.
It contains a map of Ireland
The place where we did originate.
Near the borders of three counties
Is the place where our name is shown,
Longford, Cavan,and Leitrim, they.
Where we Flynn's were, it is known.
We brought our souvenir back home
From the Emerald Isle in '09,
A trip enjoyed by my wife and me
Along with those two brothers of Mine.
Daren Flynn
The Little Puzzle Piece
Once upon a time there was a little puzzle piece. She had 999 brothers and sisters. She always felt like she was unimportant and was just a plain ol’ piece. She stood on the side as she watched her brothers and sisters get put together in place. Wondering when it would be her time. After a week of waiting, she realized that soon it would be her time. One day she got too close to the edge of the table. Plummeting down on to the floor. “Just great” she thought. Suddenly she feels the ground shake. Followed by loud thumping. This mini giant was heading right to her. Maybe this mini giant will put her back. As she was picked up, she believed that her luck was changing. When suddenly she was heading into a dark wet cavern. She was tossed around by big slimy thing. Fearing this was the end, she ushered her final words. “Goodbye cruel world”. A peek of light shined through. A glorious finger angel appeared and grabbed her. She was saved! To her surprise, while in the dark cavern she changed she was no longer her small orange self. She was a little larger and soggy. Filled with sorrow, thinking that she would no longer be useful and must be thrown away. One of the larger giants grabbed her and put her into place with her other brothers and sisters. Now she saw that not only was she important to complete the picture but she now stood out.
Vanessa Holmquist
It’s my son’s trumpet
This trumpet’s story starts with...a violin.
We had a piano at our house but a very young Hokan wanted to play a violin. I arranged for a teacher who was willing to take on a young reader and rented a small violin from the local music store.
Hokan, like many of us when learning a new skill, hoped—maybe even expected—to become a maestro after a couple of lessons. When it didn’t work out that way, in frustration, he threw the little wooden instrument across the room.
I approached the discarded violin with trepidation but exhaled with relief when I saw that it was undamaged. I stowed it in its case and promptly returned it to the music store.
A couple of years later it was time for Hokan to participate in 5th grade band. I dutifully attended the meeting at the grade school and stood in a line to rent-to-own—a trumpet. I don’t know why he chose the trumpet.
When it was my turn, I emphatically told the music store man at the table, “I want the cheapest trumpet you have because my son will not stick with it.” Recalling the flight of the violin I knew I couldn’t be certain that he would demonstrate any more respect towards the trumpet than he had the violin.
Fifth grade came and went, then sixth, seventh and eighth and Hokan learned to play the trumpet. He even practiced. In high school he took private lessons. He became the right hand man for the school band teacher even the first chair. He and his trumpet and some band members went to a music festival in Spokane. He did a solo at a district music festival and rode a bus with the band to perform at Disneyland.
He did abuse it occasionally, most notably when he colored it with a rainbow of Sharpie pen.
Hokan graduated from high school and the trumpet accompanied him on Amtrak to New Orleans for college where once again, he took individual lessons. After graduating from Tulane University the trumpet returned with him to Frenchtown. The next time he left home, the trumpet rested undisturbed in an unobtrusive place beside the piano—for about five years.
A couple of weeks ago on his 29th birthday, I carried the battered case—with trumpet inside— on a plane from Missoula to reunite it with Hokan in North Carolina. We spent the night in a hotel in Seattle and it was at SeaTac that a TSA agent grabbed the beat up brown case as it came through the scanner and asked, “What kind of instrument you have in there?”
“It’s my son’s trumpet.”
Colleen Holmquist
An object in my house: My Grandma Vance’s Pie Plate
Not that my Grandma Vance was an accomplished or renowned pie maker, even within the family, but she did appreciate good pies and would produce them for holiday and summer occasions. Nor was she especially great at cooking—though she was a much-lauded school hot-lunch cook at a two- room rural school for 12 years.
Grandma just did not really care much for cooking—her interests were more in sewing quilts or reading or raking hay and charging through other farmyard chores and taking pride in her simple flower and strawberry beds. I suspect from the delight she took in doing it occasionally, Grandma would call it good to roast a weenie over a camp fire and eat it right off the stick, if she had her druthers.
Growing up on her parents’ central Montana dairy farm, Arleen Alta Norcutt had her fill as a milkmaid, but she relished other outdoor farm chores and working with farm animals, providing for their growth and production into the food chain of the early 20th Century.
As a young woman, she turned to school teaching around the Stanford area. To get from whatever family she boarded with to the little ranch-community school houses, Grandma saddled and rode a horse—and she never became comfortable with driving a car. The remote schools where she taught included all grades, all subjects, and she was the sole teacher of 10 or fewer students at a time.
Cooking was just something that had to be done—with unmentioned love and dedicated duty—and she was well practiced at it, having helped her mother as the family’s oldest daughter with feeding six siblings and occasional hired hands or harvest crews. After she started a family of her own, school teaching was in her past and Grandma was often the sole kitchen worker in the home, until her own oldest child was able to pitch in and help.
Grandma became the school hot-lunch cook in her middle age. It was after Grandpa was permanently disabled from sustainable farming from a nearly fatal farming accident in 1957. Grandma was offered the position as the former cook was retiring and Grandma’s family needed a cash income.
Grandma’s approach to cooking was do what needed to be done, get it ready on time and fill the hungry bellies with substantial grub. Nothing fancy, but made both tasty and nutritious. She was also very practiced at growing and canning most of the family’s vegetables and a few fruits that could be harvested from thin Montana soils and short season.
Then, as the hot-lunch program cook at the school where I was a student for seven years, Grandma was also required to determine daily menus to meet minimum and optimum USDA nutritional requirements—as known in the 1960s. Mrs. Vance also kept records that her meals had reached those USDA requirements with the ingredients that were often prescribed and provided through the hot lunch program.
Unlike her predecessor, however, Grandma added a great deal of character to her hot lunches, such as making and baking her own breads—which we most often dinner rolls that she called buns. Grandma used buns in many ways, including probably inventing the first personal-sized pizzas, just when pan- sized pizza was becoming the big rage throughout the country—it was simply the most efficient way for her to prepare and serve this hot new item to school children. As her school kids, we assumed that most pizza came with thick, bread-dough crust and we never missed the mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses, which were not USDA surplus commodities.
Grandma also whipped out dozens of cookies at a time—containing prescribed ingredients provided from the USDA’s farm surplus programs, such as raisins, which were high in iron at an economy not available from other sources. Her operating budget was always tight, but Mrs. Vance found many ways to make it work so that her food was tasty for the kids, meeting program requirements with sometimes difficult-to-use commodity ingredients.
At home, she was a no-nonsense kind of cook, preferring to fry and bake with her wood burning, cast-iron kitchen stove—though when electricity came to rural Montanans following the Great Depression, she slowly warmed up to using electric ranges and ovens for some things, rather than scrounging for burnable wood.
Speaking of the Great Depression, Grandma was a farm woman who raised six children with her husband and provided for other family members during that long, bleak time. Before that, as a farm youth she had also fared through other Montana droughts. All of which formed her lifelong approach to home making and living: use it up, wear it out and then fix it to be used for something else. Waste not, want not. Long before duct tape was invented, baling wire was her go to, to hold things together.
And nobody at home ever took more onto their plate than what they would eat while they sat at the table, because she would not let anyone scrape off anything but picked-clean bones or peelings. Eat it all, no matter how long it might take —waste not, want not. And she seemed to succeed quite well at keeping her family from starving and scurvy during the worst times seen in her generations. Affection was her unspoken ingredient. Bread and butter— which she made herself—were her bread and butter.
And yet, she also found joy in food well made. And that’s where cakes and pies and jello came in. Simple preparations that could be topped off with fresh-skimmed cream—it was a dairy farm after all, first and foremost! And even when sugar was rationed, she found ways to make such treats flavorful and pleasing.
I mostly remember Grandma making bread or stew, so evidently she produced pies when pesky, noisy grandchildren were not underfoot, and so I don’t know if she had particular pie-making practices. Nor did Grandma make pies often, since fruit ingredients were on the slim side of availability, compared with ingredients for cakes or puddings and such. And jello was much easier.
But I do remember Grandma Vance had a few pie plates that stacked neatly high at the top of her tall kitchen cupboards. She left single-crust cream pies to lesser plain metal (probably aluminum) pie tins. One of her nicer pie plates somehow passed down to me, surviving a house fire. I remember this enamel green-rimmed, light brown pie plate coming along the table with apple or peach or rhubarb filling under simple crusts and ready for cream to be poured over top the served slices.
Cary Holmquist
I’m soft, yet bumpy. I am tri-colored: purple, pink and white. I was made by hand, lovingly. My life started sometime before the spring of 2008. The hands that worked me were getting older and were very sure. I have a sister made of the same colors as me, she lives in the house of another granddaughter of my maker.
The stitches were cast on, and the needles and hands worked the stitches through to their completion. Each succession of stitches made up a different square. My squares were finished and then attached to each other. A border was added. A label attached that says “Made Especially for you by Coreen Holmquist.” I was complete and ready for the big day.
The day arrived when I was delivered by the grandmother, Coreen, to the granddaughter Hosanna. It was her high school graduation day. She was overjoyed to have her very own graduation afghan. I was thrilled to be in the hands of the receiver, who got many other gifts that day, yet none that has been as meaningful and treasured.
The girl spread me out on her bed, and there I stayed for many years. Then one day a few years after my arrival, I heard the sad news one day that my maker died. She had lost her long battle to cancer. Her family obviously grieved the loss, but felt some relief that the grandmother was no longer in pain. Not long after, I moved from one small town to a new bigger town, to another bed.
The home where my new bed resided was far quieter than the first. Only two people seem to have been there with any consistency, the granddaughter and a friend. I continued to offer warmth and comfort through an illness and sadness that summer that the granddaughter experienced, and then through the cold of that winter.
Come the spring that followed, there was excitement and anticipation, as we moved two times in relatively quick succession. First we went to the purple room in the granddaughter’s first house for a few short weeks, and then we moved into another small room inside a little upstairs apartment. There was a new person, the granddaughter’s new husband. We only stayed in that home a short time before we moved again to a much larger, nicer home.
Not long after that move, yet another new person joined the granddaughter’s family. This one was small and nearly bald. She cried, ate, smiled and slept a lot. I continued my job of warming and comforting, and then another little tiny girl joined the granddaughter’s family. This one had lots of hair but acted similarly to the way the first one had upon her own arrival. The first one, the great-granddaughter as it were, seemed to like the new addition.
We moved again, this time into a small, narrow three-bedroom apartment, the granddaughter and her husband and the two little girls. I lived alternatively on the bed and the couch, wherever there was a person in need of being warmed up. In the space of years that we lived in the small three-bedroom apartment, two more little people joined the granddaughter’s family, first one little boy baby, and then a couple years later, another little boy baby. The first great-granddaughter started school. The granddaughter’s husband graduated from school. The family seemed to have long outgrown their tiny apartment by the time we made our last move.
This move took me on my longest journey yet, many hours inside a box inside a dark truck’s interior. We arrived at another house, this one larger than any of the previous places the granddaughter and I lived before. She and her family unpacked all their boxes and furniture, and we settled in.
A few months after living there, the front room is filled with a piano, two couches and three bookshelves. My new home is this room. I spend some of my time on the couch, whenever someone is sitting there and is chilly, and I wrap them in the grandmother’s love. Sometimes, I’m folded up nicely and I sit on bookshelf made by the granddaughter’s maternal grandfather. In a room surrounded by books, pictures, a map, music and artwork (much of it made by the granddaughter’s family), it’s a family room in the sense you can see the granddaughter’s family everywhere you turn. And then there’s me, the beautiful, lovingly made gift from the grandmother many years since gone, doing both a literal and figurative duty of covering the granddaughter in love.
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