Everything Old is New Again
8:48 a.m. - 2003-08-24


Yesterday he decided to go through his many boxes of books in the garage. He brought out box after box and put them on the deck. In the process, he found two boxes of mine that have been lost in the garage for 20 years. One contains the old turn-of-the-century sheet music that came from my grandparents, and one has the clippings from his grandmother.

His Grandma G was a proper 50's housewife, who had a lovely home. During her early married years, she enjoyed a hobby of antiquing and would drive around the Wisconsin rural area going to farm sales and auctions. She found some lovely things and one of them was a chest of drawers that always stood in the hallway of my inlaw's house. In the second drawer were all the recipe clippings and pamphlets Grandma G had collected over the years. When she died, my mother-in-law gave the whole collection to me. Why am I the only one who wants these reminders of a person's daily life? A lot of the recipes are in her own handwriting, and I will never know why her own daughter did not want them. I started pasting them into a scrapbook binder, and had them stored in a box while I was working on them. Unfortunately, he thought they should be stored in the garage, so he took them out there, and they got lost in the shuffle. I kept asking him over the years if he had seen them, and even a major garage clean-up a few years ago did not turn them up.

I was delighted to see them again. I have already started pasting them up into the scrapbook binder. There are clippings from the forties through the sixties from now defunct magazines. Grandma G was in several women's clubs, and they must have exchanged recipes all the time because lots of the recipes say they are from some other woman. I love the color illustration from the late forties and early fifties. One of these days I think I will throw a Grandma G dinner and invite the family, and we will try some of these old recipes.

Today is the birthday of my youngest. I still find it hard to have them away on their birthdays, it just doesn't seem right, but we will celebrate anyway. We had a funny time trying to get her gift over the internet, because the web site is in her name, so we had to open a new account in my name and flounder around (he was manning the keyboard) but it all came right in the end. I originally wanted to get her a gift certificate to Patternworks or KingArthur, but they are not very advanced and do not have Email Gift Certificates yet. Maybe I will keep some of my ideas in mind for Christmas. I did finally get her room spiffed up a little, meaning that I hadn't stripped the bed since she left, but I finally got around to it. That mattress weighs a ton, and the Harry Potter books kept attacking me, but I tamed them all and even got all those stuffed bears to behave. Happy Birthday Baby Girl!