Skip to main content

The Well-Traveled Playhouse

Sixty years ago, and a hundred miles west, Mari's grandfather built his grand-daughters a play house on the farm.  It is probably--scarcely--eight by ten feet in size; maybe seven by nine.  Once ago, the lower half of the rear wall rotted out, and was replaced.  Everything else recalls how that rear wall felt.  

Inside, Mari, her sister, Bonnie, and a cousin, Jane, wrote their names in pencil on the wall to the right.  Only if you know to look can you find the place where the stilt-like letters have left shadows.  

When Mari's dad, Parnell, sold the farm and moved into the town of Lake Mills, he took the playhouse with him, and it became a yard-tool shed, on runners.  And when Parnell died, we drove to Lake Mills, with Per from Lillehammer, and found a way to get the play house up onto a big trailer.  

It is a well traveled playhouse.  I gave it new runners, a graveled base to sit upon, and a front deck.  I think it may never travel, again.  But poor thing!  Its responsibilities, at our log house, are few, but few as they are, it deserved better than it had gotten.

Patti and Mari schemed an overnight trip to the log house, and informed their respective husbands that we were going to paint the playhouse.  Their respective husbands amassed the necessary tools and beverages, and there we were, beating back the Virginia Creeper, scraping what appeared to be a sixty-year old paint job, and disguising, as best we could, what times does to us all!

We did a pretty good job!  Not shy, we chose colors from the log house itself--colors earlier stolen from something Scandinavian--and prettied the Old Lady on about her 60th year.  


 The short day's work done, we took pictures of the craftsmen--and craftier women--and set in earnest to beverage our way toward grilling steaks in the dark, and to telling each other all about those days of yore, when grandfathers built play houses, and what a fine job we had done.

We are available for quality restoration work.  All we need is time to get the necessary tools and beverages together.  Our work is guaranteed, for the life of the paint.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more