Barn Wall of Shutters

What a journey!  If you haven’t been to the Finger Lakes Region of New York State, it is time to plan a trip!  Miles of hills and barns and fields of corn with the scattering of sunflowers in between. Folks committed to their land  along Rt. 20 with farm stands…. most holding veggies fresh that day…and many stands with the tin Folgers coffee can, a bit dented, with a slit cut in the lid where you can deposit monies for goods taken.  An honor system that only the rural merchant farmer believes in!  I bought jam made from  the flowers of Queen Anne’s Lace, which grows wild in the fields, and I bought Bread and Butter pickles, which reminded me of my own mother’s B&B pickles.  (What I would give for a canning session with her once again!)  Besides the buying,  it was the experience of it all…chatting it up with the farmer and his wife, the pickle maker, and meeting the wife’s 84 year-old mother who sat roadside under a shade umbrella with nary a line on her wonderful face.  For the truth of who we are as a country, you must go to the rural world, sit under the shade umbrella, eat a local peach whose  juice drips down your elbow, and talk canning with an 84 year-old!

Inn on the Main

Times past, I have avoided a bed and breakfast stay like one might avoid the plague!  This  amazing place (photo does it no justice), owned by the innkeepers Jaynee and Guy Straw, opened a whole new world to me!  Give me this bed and breakfast anytime!  For starters the innkeepers were beyond delightful.  The interior was lovely…my room (with a fire place), well…I could have moved right in-just me and two little pugs!  Jaynee and Guy gave us directions for an evening meal at, of all places, a Mexican restaurant!  This in the heart of Canandaigua, New York!  I took them up on the challenge…after all, I am from the West.  I know my Mexican food…last best Mexican meal was in Nevada, and I truly doubted it could have topped that!  Before I go into overdrive on the evening meal at said restaurant, let me just say the breakfast served the morning of our departure was jaw dropping!  Try homemade French toast with toasted macadamia nuts and New York maple syrup, perfect cups of coffee (my friend Diane tells me I like “party coffee”…I add heaps of half and half and sugar…bring on the party!) and on the plate lovely slices of fruit.  Is it no wonder I could have moved in!

The Wall of Rio Tomatlan...About the Best Ever Mexican Restaurant!

This is it!  I would happily drive there, right now, for dinner!  I adore  Mexican food and was over-the-moon with this place…in fact, I had lunch there the next day before heading East…yep, a Mexican lunch shortly after the French toast breakfast!  Somehow I managed to find a little space for Queso Fundido (grilled mini tacos with melted Oaxaca cheese, fresh pico de gallo and a tomatillo chile de arbol sauce)!

Bounty from Roadtrip

Victorian Feather Basket in Shadowbox and Old Canvas

This whole adventure was taken to find more antiques for the store…I did find some real treasures though fewer items than I expected.  They will all be in the store, yes! for sale, when we reopen on September 7th.  I can’t wait to see you all again!  Next adventure will be the Gift Show…more dining, big decisions on what to bring into the store next, late nights in New York City with fellow shop owners.  Though I will love every minute of it, I can’t say I would rather be there than sitting under a shade umbrella with an 84 year-old jelly maker in upstate New York!

One Tiny Corner of the Underbelly!

All week I have been crawling around in the basement of my store.  Thank God it is blissfully cool down there…getting a photo for this blog of the array of goodies is mighty difficult.  I remember once standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon…this was years ago when a friend and I did a Thelma and Louise-type road trip…left the kids at home with our husbands and off we went in her white Peugot station wagon.  Our husbands agreed to such nonsense…knowing if they didn’t, we would most likely go anyway.  Well, that is another story, but the point is this: I am trying to give you a sense of  the goodies in this basement!  And I am finding that it  is akin to that time I attempted a shot of the Grand Canyon with my Brownie Hawk Eye camera!  What I am shamelessly attempting to do here is urge you all to hop on a plane if you live far away or come on your bike if you live close and partake of the wealth of my collecting!  This basement is full of unnecessary and irresistible objects (trust me, I know…I bought them all!) that will be curbside out front of the store on Friday July 30th for the summer sale.  Lots and lots of good stuff from the store shelves and a great sampling of the props from the basement.  I need a good purge before Fall rolls in!

Don’t forget…we will be closed for all of August.  I will be going on a few adventures in western New York State seeking more antiques for the store and will post from the road!  Happy late summer and don’t forget to wear your sunblock!

The Magic Above My Store!

 Nine years ago, when I thought about opening a store, I met my future and present landlords.  I met also the magic of men who love trains…these “boys” are dedicated, let me assure you of that!  They have the whole of the second floor of the building that houses 6 Birch…I understand it is some four thousand square feet up there (my store is a tiny little 450 sq. ft.).  Well, on that second floor are miles (or so it seems) of model train tracks…all constructed on waist-high tables.  You can stare into villages created with minature people and town squares and trees all hand-made by the train men.  There is a swimming scene with folks on teeny tiny beach chairs, and I believe a nude diver about to take a plunge off the tressel into the water below.  The cars in the town squares appear vintage and are no bigger than a man’s thumb!  There are hills and train smoke and sounds of the passing engines as they move through the mountain tunnels.  I can tell you it is pure fantasy….open to the public twice a year.  If you are in the neighborhood the first weekend in December or the first weekend in March, head on up the narrow wooden stairs for a delightful awe-inspiring adventure!

The early and mid-fifties of my own childhood was spent with weekend visits to my Zio (uncle) and Zia (aunt) who lived in the Southern Pacific Yard in Sparks, Nevada.  Zio was a Section Foreman for the SP, and he lived in a “grand” wooden house painted the color of an egg’s yoke, a bright hard-to-miss mustard yellow.  On Saturday, just after lunch, we would gather in the living room, all would be silent while opera was broadcast on the radio.  I remember it to be the Met Opera Series; my uncle would close his eyes and swoon while the sounds of Tosca filled the room.  My cousin and I would slip out into the garden and wander towards the Round House…a huge wooden structure built entirely of wood with a tin roof and completely round with two giant openings.  The wood was black with the soot of the engines that were turned around in this round house.  It felt adventurous to a couple of  kids wandering through an “off limits” area over train tracks, snooping around for the hobos who would jump onto the next slow moving train for another world far from our own.  Is it any wonder I love the train men who are my landlords and the world they inhabit!

The Last of Summer's Leaves

Well, what can be said of a Tuesday…the middle of February, the dead of winter and another snowstorm.  My friend Diane labeled it this morning: “restless” that’s what she said.  It is true I want to take up belly dancing and get a wild tattoo.  I want to throw a few worn out linens in the suitcase and head for the sun.  I want some cold outrageous coconut drink,  and I want to sip the whole thing poolside with a sweet young pool boy who delivers it to my chaise lounge.  I am wearing the worn linen trousers, and the sun is covering my bare feet…my face is, of course, protected by a big colorful shade umbrella.

I went to see Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart yesterday, and I left the theater with an urge to head west.  And once I got there, I would walk into one of those bars that dot the side roads of Nevada.  I can imagine the smell of such a place, having been there more than a time or two.  It would smell of stale smoke and wet wool and spilled beer, and the bar itself would be rubbed smooth.  The tall bar stools would have chrome legs and tired leatherette seats.  In fact, the  whole place would look a bit tired.  There would be a juke box playing Western songs, and I would settle right in way over there in the dark corner, and I would watch the world happen.

Parked  out front, at odd angles, would be pick-up trucks with dented bodies and back ends littered with assorted pieces of ranch life like shovels and maybe a big black and white Blue Heeler just waiting for his master.  There would be hay scattered on the worn bed of the truck and, you just know, there would be a gun rack and bumper stickers from political parties I would have nothing to do with!  But I would love the scene for the moment and for that time “restless” would not enter my world!

 My mother could get restless, and when she did the whole house would shift.  Moving furniture was an art form for her…something one did when all else seemed so the same.  Over her lifetime, she shifted the bathroom at the house on the corner of 6th & G Streets three times….the sink, toilet and tub went from Avocado to Harvest Gold. In the end, they were all Mauve…her final and most cherished color!  Of course, this shifting, which grew from “restless,” required a plumber and a carpenter and took weeks to manifest…but it cured her “restless” for the time being.

Party Still Life!

Well, I promised a few weeks back, when I posted the ‘Over The Hill’  bag  that photos were to follow…now, this is not to imply that I am over the hill…God Forbid!  But I am in a new decade of life.  It seems there have been so many: there were children decades, married decades, and there were decades of driving a big mustard yellow Volvo on the wide open highways of  Northern California.   It was that same Volvo that I would park curb side of the brown shingled  house on Locust Avenue in Mill Valley, and of a warm summer day, you could find me and my down pillow, with a good book, curled up in the way-back of that mustard car.  If the weather was just perfect, not too hot, not too cold, I could catch a nap between pages of the trash novel I was reading.  I might call that decade my ‘easy decade’!  I might be tempted to think of this new decade as my wild, fun decade!  Long gone is the mustard Volvo, the house, the husband, the children are grown…so why not move right into WILD!

Candlelight and Flowers on a Cold January Night

Everyone, young and old, just plain looks better with candlelight!  Add to that, remarkable flowers in colors found only in the early summer.  I just can’t imagine a better January treat!

Silas and the Blues Band

Dancing fools!

Wally in late September at "The Arb"

The first time I saw Wally, it was November; he was seven weeks old and in the arms of his breeder.  He was wrapped in a turquoise towel, his little face peeking out from the folds.  I was there to think about getting a dog.  Mind you, I say think…up until the moment I laid eyes on him, I was certain I could easily walk away.  He cost what felt like a fortune; I thought this whole thing was a bit excessive, even if it was my idea to buy a pug.  I didn’t have a clue about dogs, no sense of their purchase price, no idea of the time or monies to follow just to keep the old boy upright!  In fact, his purchase price was a bargain given what the next 13 years would bring!  Wally (Wallace when he was wearing more formal attire) was a challenge…he had more trainers than I have had husbands, he couldn’t bear the sounds of air brakes or the color yellow of a school bus.  I like to think this was his worn chino stage, which he wore with a muscle tee shirt with a pack of unfiltered smokes in the rolled-up sleeve!  He was a thug in those days, nearly impossible to train, who slept on sofas and beds and loved the very best to curl up on the coat of some guest…especially if said guest didn’t relate to dogs!  Wally saw me through the death of my partner, my father, my mother, and assorted friends who all left this world way too early.  Wally stuck it out and knew when to be present with grief.  He has aged and is now in his dressing gown stage…I like to imagine it to be one of those silky types with a small print and a lovely silk satin shawl collar and with this he would be wearing a pair of black needlepoint slippers with the image of a fawn pug on each foot.  They would be the sort of slippers that the Duke of Windsor wore when he and the “Dutchie” lounged about with their assorted pugs.  There is no question that Wally is slowing down and that this will be his last winter.  I wonder what will become of Lulu who adores him as much as I do.  She is blind and toothless.  Wally is her seeing eye companion, and he is my long-time beau.  How lucky I have been to have had them both!