Yesterdays Post I talked about finishing up and starting to put the furniture back in the bedroom. I am re-arranging and swapping out furniture as I go. So I am putting the wash stand here. I painted this piece last year.
We started putting the other pieces of furniture in the room. I decided to put all of our brown pieces together and the white pieces together in the guest rooms. But what this has done is I have had to take everything out of every piece of furniture. Oh the stuff!
This brings us to the dresser, my dresser from when I was a child. If you have ever heard the saying, if only this piece could talk, well this one can by using my voice, or my fingers to type.
This piece with all of it's scuffs has traveled so many places.
Some people like adventure, so do Charles and I, and our adventure is rescuing old furniture. But this dresser and a chest of drawers was mine since childhood. It was made in the 1940s and as soon as I could sleep in a bed and not roll out, I went straight from a crib to an adult bedroom suit. The bones of this dresser is good, very good. I can either refinish it or leave it as it is.
When I was little this was my secret drawer where I kept my secret items. Then when I was a teen I kept facial cream which Noxzema cold cream was popular at that time, and a little bit of make up. I was never one to wear much make up. It was a hankie drawer, a jewelry drawer, which, I did not wear much jewelry either. Only what I received as gifts.
This was our home, it was built in the year 1940.
In the 1950s it was our home. This picture was taken in the late 1950's before our life changed the year 1960. This house burned during the night as we slept. Between 4:00 and 5:00 A.M. a man drove by our house and saw it burning so he held his hand down on his car horn to wake us up. My Grandmother visiting for the holidays grabbed the back of my pajamas and my brother too and pushed us down to the floor and told us to crawl to the front door as she continued to push us through our fear of seeing flames lapping to our left trying to get to the front door.
The kitchen caught first, that is the room with the boards over the windows. Our table and chairs set in front of those windows. The kitchen area on the opposite wall. The wiring in a fan above the stove is what they said caused the fire.
Somehow we all ended up out in the grass of our neighbors front yard across the street in just the pajamas we had on when we went to bed.
I have a full picture somewhere of the entire house burned but I cannot find it but when I come across it I will post it.
My bedroom was on the back left side of the house. My grandmother was staying in my room while visiting and I was staying in my brothers room. Everything in the house was damaged, if the fire did not get it, the smoke did. After saving what few things could be saved my father took my furniture to a man that he knew that could clean it. This is the drawer out of the tall Chest of Drawers that I just pulled out and emptied to show you.
To this day, this drawer, you can see the imprint of the smoke around objects that were inside the drawer during the fire.
I keep pretty drawer paper in my drawers, but I know the smoke stains are there. I am thankful to have this reminder of how the man that held his hand on his horn woke us up, just in time to save our lives.
Dad and Mom did build back but our lives changed and little did I know that I would be on a completely new journey to living in a old small farm house, raising a cow, goat and chickens.
Then I left that little country farm house and that furniture to be on my own married journey to an even smaller house, with very little modern items. I would be hand washing my clothes when I could not get to a laundromat , no telephone, no television, no type of communication but pen and paper and stamps. This was when I started learning the most sensible part of life.
The furniture came back to me once again many years later, when my mother was moving and asked if I wanted it. It had taken its own journey without me with many moves and in many houses but always with my mother. It was with my son for a little while and then back with me. My mother was back with me, Charles and I, when her health declined with dementia until her passing on to God.
The last part of this story I have never posted about, that I can remember, maybe I did but here it is. It is about a picture that was hanging in the hallway of our house that burned in 1960. The hallway that we crawled through to the front door to escape.
I am not saying this was a miracle, I am just showing something very real that happened that we cannot explain.
You saw the picture of my drawer with the smoke stains in the bottom of this solid Mahogany chest of drawers, not the dresser but the heavy chest of drawers that was in my bedroom during the fire.
This picture was hanging up on the wall in the non protected hallway that was coming off the living room. This entire area, many parts of the house the roof fell in, the walls were burned.
Yet the walls burned around it and charred the back. I do not take this picture off our wall to clean because I am doing my best to preserve the burned backside. I do not understand how the smoke did not get inside this picture and yes, it had glass and had a paper back. But the heat itself broke and cracked glass all through the house.
It is very brittle, I do not take the picture down to clean it. It was moved with my mother every time she made a move to a new house and I am thankful that it is still not damaged other than the burned back.
So this is going to be one of my many questions that I ask God when I get to see him in Heaven because I find it very interesting.
I will see you tomorrow or Thursday, with another Peek Week Post as I clean through the house.
Grandma Donna
