Now Where Was I?

Boy, I just can't shake my loyal fan base. The longer I go without writing the more guilty I feel and so I avoid it. I'm also supposed to be blogging for a Mothers & More blog, and I haven't done that either. Spring happened, I guess, and what with all the pressure to mulch, I've just been doing that. Not really.

I'll just jump into this post, but I've no idea what it will be about.

My dad is moving to a retirement community in June, and my brother Dan and I have been carting off stuff from his house that we want. We have agreed very amicably so far. My mother, who died six years ago of a brain aneurysm when I was six weeks pregnant with Jack, had collected a number of antiques. What a bizarre sentence I just wrote. Like with my knitting, I don't believe I will go back and "rip it out." I'm a beginning knitter, and the scarf I am creating has the craziest knots and holes, and how the heck did they get there? Anyway, our house now has the following furniture:

A rustic "farm table" that we eat on now instead of the Ikea

A drop leaf table that my family ate on every night during my entire childhood and adolescence

An old but not antique bureau with drawers that don't stick (for the boys)

A cedar chest from the early 1970s that was in my room as a child, that I hid a number of dubious things in

A very small drop leaf table that we're going to use as an end table

A "butler's table" with a top that the "butler" just lifts off with the silver tea set on it, I suppose (we'll have to anchor it down in some way that is reversible and doesn't compromise its value)

A small table with glass knobs and a drawer darker than the rest of the wood (which I find strangely compelling)

A fancy table on wheels that also has drop leaves that we have in the entrance hall. My mother loved drop leaf tables.

A small chest with three drawers for the table linens

Enough table linens to need a full-time laundress

A rustic corner cupboard for the dining room (my brother lives in a geodesic dome; therfore he has no corners for it to live in)

An antique chest that used to have the aforementioned linens heaped up in it

A Vienna regulator that doesn't work

Four assorted antique mirrors of various sizes and with assorted visibility issues

Two oil paintings that my great grandmother painted

Two 1940s-era marble lamps

A needlepoint footstool

A needlepoint "fireplace screen" on a wooden pole on a three-legged base

A "fireplace screen" for in front of the fireplace, to keep sparks and ashes in and children out. (The above item and this one are completely different but seemed to be called the same thing. Why is our fireplace accoutrement vocabulary so impoverished, I ask you?)

To come: lots of dainty little china cups, finger bowls, and salt and pepper shakers that my great grandmother painted, boxes full of incredibly beautiful and moving photographs that my grandmother took of us, my mother, and other people, which she developed herself and that desperately need to be properly archived, a massive silver service, a set of Limoge china.

Our house smells like my parents' house now, John says, but I haven't noticed.