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It's a dream--my own dining room!
When I got to the house, the dining room was all set with a huge
table covered with a daisy tablecloth with a vase of artificial daisies. I have lots of antiques, parts of my doll collection,
and other things that I have had never been able to show where anybody could see them. I love all the goodies. I am
thrilled to share some of them with you.
This is my adorable table, with the daisy tablecloth and the daisies in the
vase. I have added a very special teddy bear, which was given to me by fellow author Glenda Stice for Christmas several years
ago. Glenda makes candles, and the teddy bear is dipped in vanilla scented wax. It smells so great, and he is just soooo cute.
I am glad to have him take center stage on the table.
The little candle in the frying pan was brought over here by Billie. It is a gingerbread scented candle, and Billie
can't stand gingerbread. (She doesn't like pumpkin pie either! Everybody has to have at least one strange little glitch in
their lives!) I promised her I won't light it when I know she's coming over.
The beautiful floral arrangement on the stand in the corner was given to me by Raquel's friend, the former Playboy
bunny. (You can see more about her on my blog at http://www.janetelainesmith.blogspot.com in my tribute to Ivan.)
The picture on the wall is an embroidery of The Last Supper. I started it many years ago, and Raquel finished it for
me.
This is my "Dakota Printer corner." I have a copy of the book on top of my "good"
silverware chest.
The hanger on the wall was owned by Ivan's grandfather, Walter Cole Smith, who
ran many small newspapers in Minnesota, Wisconsin and North Dakota. He was my role model for the book, Dakota Printer.
The hanger collapses and he carried it with him, in his pocket, every day when he went to work at the printshop. He would
take his suit jacket off and hang it up while he put out the newspaper. Like Jonathan Bohner in Dakota Printer, he
never seemed to get any ink on himself.
The picture above the hanger is a collage of Walter Cole Smith and his family, including
one of Walter with his employees at the newspaper shop in Ruthton, Minnesota.
This is the rest of my stand in the "Dakota Printer corner." Ivan was a fantastic
chef, and he had many cookbooks. I knew how to cook when we got married, but a couple of goofs on my part convinced him that
he should take over that job, as well as the grocery shopping. I had a lot of other things I would rather have been doing,
so I was delighted. (I have learned to bread various foods, despite his belief that I could never accomplish that!) When I
moved to Wisconsin, Raquel wanted his fancy cookbooks. I kept my Betty Crocker cookbooks, as well as a few others. You see
them here.
The bottom shelf has two very special teapots that were given to me by the kids. (See more
about one of them by clicking on the picture at the footer on each page in the website.) The soup tureen was also given to
me by the kids for Christmas one year. Ivan and I always had oyster stew for Christmas Eve supper. The kids hated oysters,
so they always had pizza. None of us ever crossed the line to the other dish. One year they found this soup tureen in an antique
shop and they knew I had to have it; it is an oyster! After that, we always had it on the table on Christmas Eve, with our
very special recipe Ivan had for the stew that came from Baltimore when he was in the Army. If you would like the recipe,
please email me and put "Oyster stew recipe" in the subject line.
This is one of the shelves with my dolls and a selection of my books. Finally,
people can see them! It is such fun.
The "little girl" standing in the corner was a gift to me from Raquel when she was probably
about 5 years old. It is, of course, a soft-sculpture doll. In a minute you will see her counterpart, standing in the other
corner.
When the kids were very little, Ivan would not spank them, but would sentence them to go
sit or stand in "the dumb corner." Oh, how they hated that! No books, no TV, no toys, just a blank wall to stare at. Many
a valuable lesson was learned in the dumb corner. The kids had gone shopping with Ivan to get me something for Christmas.
Raquel spotted those two dolls in the window of a used-crafts shop. She insisted that she wanted to give them to me. Ivan
relented, and that was my Christmas present. When I opened them, she said, "Now we don't have to stand in the dumb corner
anymore. They can stand there instead of us." Ivan (always the preacher) laughed and said, "That's sort of like what Jesus
did for us when He died on the cross."
| My "Grandma Bowen shelf" |
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This adorable shelf unit was one Billie and Tom brought over here. I have a
lot of my "goodies" on it.
One shelf has the adorable Precious Moments miniature creche set Raquel and
Ivan got for me over a period of several years. It is much smaller than the one that is listed online many places as their
"miniature creche set." That one is ceramic, and mine is pewter. It fits inside a cake plate, which keeps it safe and dust-free.
The three wisemen are outside the display, partially because they wouldn't fit in it, and partly because we all know they
came much later!
There is one shelf that is my "Grandma Bowen shelf." Grandma Bowen was my mother's
grandmother, but everybody called her "Grandma Bowen," even if they weren't relatives. It has an antique tiny teapot, sugar
bowl and creamer she gave me that has violets on it. There is also a covered casserole dish, again with violets on it--both
inside and outside the dish. There is a cut-glass basket with shamrocks carved into the glass that came to America with her
mother and father. It was a gift to them when they got married, so it is over 150 years old. There are two photos of Grandma
Bowen.
The brown pitcher is one she had for many years. She always served milk from it, and she
always had a big plate of homebaked cookies. Many years after Grandma Bowen had died, I located one of Ivan's still-living
Keith relatives, Mabel Keith, an old-maid school teacher who was living in Illinois. As we began to discuss both Ivan's families
and mine being from Lake City, Minnesota (but that's another story!), she just screamed when I mentioned Grandma Bowen. She
told me that nearly every day on her way home from school, the kids would stop at Grandma Bowen's house and pretend to pick
her johnny-jump-ups in the front yard. Grandma Bowen (who was about 4'8") would come out, shaking her broom and yelling at
them to leave her flowers alone. Then she would go back inside the house and come out with milk and cookies for all the kids.
"I wonder what ever happened to that brown pitcher?" she asked. "When you looked at it you
felt like you could just walk through that path between the trees on it.
"I have it on my kitchen table," I said to her. With a smile on my face, I added, "I have
flowers in it."
"Flowers?" She literally screamed it at me. "That pitcher is meant to have milk in it--not flowers! You
go take them out of there right now! I'll hang on while you do."
So, I obediently went and pulled the artificial flowers out of the pitcher.
"Don't you ever put anything but milk in that pitcher again!" she admonished me.
I haven't.
The Irish fairy doll is not an antique, but it seemed appropriate to go on the shelf. You
see, all of my life, as well as that of my mother, Grandma Bowen told us about Ireland. We all knew she came direct from the
Emerald Isle. It was only after her death when I inherited her personal scrapbook that I discovered that she was born in Rossi,
New York! She never saw the shores of Ireland. But oh, the yarns she could spin! I'm sure that she heard so many tales from
her parents and her older brothers, who did all come from Ireland, must have made things there seem so real that it just became
a part of her. When I told my mother that Grandma Bowen had never been to Ireland, my own mother called me a liar! Can you
imagine that? I got the proof from NY that she was indeed born there. My mother's comment? "Well, she must have found a Blarney
Stone someplace and kissed it way too many times!" I added a tiny ceramic leprechaun to the shelf too. I figured she probably
had one of them tucked away someplace too.
And now we come to the little boy doll. That was, according to Raquel, Willy, her older
brother. One night, not too long after I got them, Willy must have had a bad dream about them. He told me, "Raquel keeps hitting
me." I went out and moved the dolls to opposite corners and they have never stood in the same dumb corner since!
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