Very Old Things

This is about some very old things I knew of as a child.  I would go visit my father's mother, grandma, several times each year.  She lived just a few hours away on the coast so it was always nice to go and see her.  Or wait, they were on the coast but now that I think of it, we never went to the beach when we went to visit her.  Still, we had a great time, even if sun and sand weren't on the list of things to experience for the day.

She lived in an old house.  I mean, OOOld.  At least to a young child, this house seemed old.  There was a wrap-around porch with a porch swing.  Paint was peeling everywhere or maybe it was more accurate to say that paint was still on the house in some places.   This was the home my father was raised in, so it was a magical place even so.

There was this enormous tree in the side yard that was climbable, although there were very few trees that thwarted me when I took a notion to climb them as a child.  Lots of times my aunt would be there too and some or all of my four cousins would be there with her.  Playing with your cousins in a large, old, creaky house with a big yard was about all the fun you needed when you were a child.

My grandmother had a sewing machine in her bedroom that was one of those very old sewing table things.  It was all black metal and there was a foot pedal you could push and things would spin.  How you would sew using this thing was beyond me, but since she did lots of delicate sewing, I supposed it was possible.

But the very best old thing in her house was something I heard about all my childhood, but never saw.  She had this huge freezer on the side of her kitchen.  She had it packed with layers and layers of frozen food.  She had, apparently, saved a piece of cake from my parent's wedding and it was most likely at the very bottom of that freezer.  I heard her or my parents tell the tale of the saved wedding cake slice many times as I grew up.

Talk about exciting to a child.  That's right, we're talking cake, and aged cake at that; and you know how much children love cake.  Surely if my grandmother saved a piece for all those years it must have been something to behold.  I wanted to see that piece of cake, even though everyone always laughed and said it would taste terrible by now.

I never saw the piece of cake.  When she died or when the freezer did, no one called to tell me they had found the long lost piece of cake.  It lives on in my memory though.

The Big Boy Update:  Locked out!  Today at a birthday party, my son needed to go to the potty.  He went in, selected a stall and I helped him get on the seat.  I could tell this was going to take a few minutes so I stepped out into the main bathroom area to check email when suddenly, I hear the door being shut and bolted.  "Well, this is an interesting development," I thought.  I told him to let me know when he was ready to be wiped.  A few minutes later another mother walks in and I explain I've been locked out for the first time and I'm not sure how long we'll be here.  She and I laugh abd talk about how funny kids can be.  Eventually, my son is done and he unlocks the door and I help him before we leave, him acting like this was a normal occurrence.  I am so glad I didn't have to crawl under the stall door.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  "Where's the ca-der-pill-der?"  We were watching a short film of the book The Hungry Caterpillar.  My daughter was enjoying it to the end.  After that short was over, another story about the moon started, but we had a hard time listening because my daughter kept asking where the caterpillar had gone.