Tipp City Finds 4

Crossroads Consignments in Tipp City, Ohio, has no peer. Owner Becky Peura’s passion is to offer items of lasting value and to display them artistically. I have made so many purchases from Becky’s shop that I must exercise discipline to limit myself to one “find” for this blog. I have chosen an unusual object: an oversized wreath made of oversized wooden acorns. For Christmas, I hung the wreath above the living room fireplace. My cousin, artist Sally Arnold, made the lovely bow and attached it to the wreath.

Oversized Acorn Wreath from Crossroads Consignments

Having grown up on a farm, I enjoyed early exposure to meadows, creeks, and woods. I quickly developed a deep and lasting love for nature. Acorns fascinate me perhaps as much as they fascinate squirrels.

In 1830, Scottish author Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) wrote, “When the oak tree is felled the whole forest echoes with it; but a hundred acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.” (Surprisingly few websites name the source of the quotation: Carlyle’s essay “On History.”) Carlyle suggests that the course of history arises from an infinite number of tiny, often random, actions. I like to think that whoever made my wreath knew the famous quotation from Carlyle and showed that countless capricious actions can form perfection in the same way that the acorns are twined in a perfect circle. Even if the builder of the wreath did not have Carlyle in mind, a circle formed of acorns affords a pleasing aesthetic.

I wonder how Becky can bear to part with such lovely items as the acorn wreath, yet her shop with its rapidly changing inventory is always packed with attractive objects from furniture to decorations (and everything in between). While I do not know Becky well, I suspect that she sees her mission as bringing joy to her customers.

On the farm where I grew up were two ancient oaks. Tall and elegant, they stood beside each other, supporting one another. To this day, my memory of the oaks reminds me of my parents, whose unshakable love for one another had grown with the years. My father and mother, who led upstanding lives, remain my principal inspiration. Faced with dilemmas, I ask myself what they would have done under similar circumstances, and I never regret choosing what I am confident would have been their answers.

A wreath of acorns, then, serves as a lovely ornament for Christmas. Thanks, Becky, for selling it to me!

Gardening 2

“The influence of her taste was seen also in the family garden, where the ornamental began to mingle with the useful; whole rows of fiery marigolds and splendid hollyhocks bordered the cabbage beds, and gigantic sunflowers lolled their broad, jolly faces over the fences, seeming to ogle most affectionately the passers-by.”

     —“Wolfert Webber, Or Golden Dreams,” in Tales of a Traveler by Washington Irving

A few years ago, I had the happy inspiration to surround my vegetable garden with a floral border mixing “fiery marigolds” and “gigantic sunflowers.” My thought was to cut as many bouquets as I might like, and I have gathered armloads of blossoms from the prolific display of flowers surrounding my beans and squash. Even so, I have experienced an irrational reluctance to turn to my borders for blooms. The profusion of petals is so spectacular en masse and such an invitation to butterflies and birds that I am hesitant to claim any zinnias or cosmos for my kitchen or living room. To demur is silly. After all, at the end of the season, the flowers will have gone to seed and, in the spring, their stalks will be plowed under. I might as well remain true to my vision and cut flowers at will.

My Garden on May 12, 2016

Unlike the character in Irving’s tale, I have no cabbages for my flowers to accompany. While I like cooked cabbage—especially on St. Patrick’s Day—I seldom have enough use for cabbage to justify growing any in my garden. When I was growing up, my mother planted rows of cabbages. For exhibits at the annual 4-H fair, we walked up and down in search of the largest cabbage, a heavy one with great waxy leaves spread so wide that it was all I could do to hold it in front of me and to lug it back to the house. In retrospect, I wonder what my mother did with all that cabbage. When I was very young, she made sauerkraut in ancient crocks that huddled in the darkness of a cellar beneath our smokehouse, but, by the time I participated in the gardening projects at the county fair, she no longer made kraut. Our family ate plenty of cooked cabbage, but we could not possibly have consumed as much as my mother grew. A cabbage conundrum!

Sunflowers I have in abundance! Small and large, yellow and red, my sunflowers may not “ogle most affectionately the passers-by,” but they serve as banquets for birds and squirrels. At precisely the moment when their diamond-pattern seed cushions become ready for shelling, the birds come to help themselves to the bounty. In only a day or two, the seeds are pecked loose. The birds are not tidy. They drop many seeds on the ground. The squirrels do not pause to thank their feathered compatriots; rather, they busily comb the ground to scavenge every seed abandoned by the birds.

Alas! I have no hollyhocks. I admire them in the distant yards of neighbors, but I grow none of my own. Up close, they are so dry, dusty, insect-ridden, and full of spiders that I am loath to plant any.

My borders feature the delicately arching cosmos, the frankly sturdy marigold, the utterly dependable zinnia, and the wonderfully robust tithonia in rainbows of hue and tint. Going to the garden to fetch a batch of beans is a treat for the eyes!