Pages

Showing posts with label Mom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mom. Show all posts

Sunday, October 4, 2009

her name was Henrietta

Every autumn I gather different photos for my annual hommage to my mother's love of asters. . .a bittersweet project for sure.
These from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois would have made her smile.

Pick more flowers at Luiz Santilli's Today's Flowers meme -- a perfect way to start the week!

The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.
Gertrude Jekyll

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Two lumps of sugar and pass the cream if you will

Another Thursday dawns and that means playing Blue's Favourite Things Thursday--when I search through the cobwebs of my mind for those illusive dreams and things that make me happy. This week its a collection of small pitchers/creamers like these:



which I pick up randomly at thrift stores, yard sales and occasionally a real antique shop if the price is within my 'pitcher' budget. I've collected these in the 1-1/2 years I've lived in the Twin Cities. However, safely packed away in storage is a box full of over 30 years of collecting. Someday they'll be rescued from bubble wrap and properly displayed.

After many years of no contact with my mother and father -- long story -- after we were reacquainted, when I showed my mom my burgeoning collection she, being who she was, ran out and bought me not only a pitcher but the accompanying sugar bowl, coffee pot, demitasse cups and saucers in a gold rimmed, porcelain flower pattern, made in Bavaria! Being of Bavarian extraction, she had a remarkable eye for beautiful porcelain combined with a champagne appetite on a beer salary. She was thoroughly convinced her love of beautiful things was her German-ness.

I have pewter, Irish pottery, English glass and cranberry glass pitchers from Massachusetts plus recycled gems from yard sales in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and Chicago--just about everywhere I've lived. Gifted pitchers are the best because it means I'm well known by the giver. I've noticed too that I usually wind up selecting my favorite colors without fully intending to.

Most recently the porcelain pitcher with pink roses on the far right below was purchased at a garage sale from an older lady who was liquidating. She said it was her favorite and she'd given it many uses. I got it for a song.



Yup, when I turned it over, the bottom was marked. . . Bavaria.

Visit Blue to see more favourite things of hers and her friends or you might even want to play along.