Music to the rescue

You may think that that title doesn’t make any sense, but let me tell you it definitely does. Two nights ago I went to bed having just finished putting together the most beautiful by day bed you have ever seen that I bought on eBay. I’ve looked for one of these for many years but they’ve always been too expensive, so when I saw this one for $300 in a suburb only an hour away I bid on it and won it much to my delight. After picking it up I had vanished would back to its original condition and put on my front porch where I planned on using it on the weekends to watch everybody else walk past and mow their lawns. In the middle of the night I woke up to hear the old silver wind chimes clattering wildly and then falling to the ground on the front deck. I jumped out of bed and ran outside just in time to see two guys take off across the road and leap my neighbours fence and climb down the hill under the highway. I noticed that my new day bed  was halfway down my front stairs and wind chimes were all tangled around one of the legs on the ground. Obviously these two guys had taken a liking to my bed and decided to steal it in the middle of the night. They had tangled with the chimes and had to drop the bed and runaway. I chased them across the road and down under the highway but I lost them as they crossed the six lanes of traffic into the local park. I decided it wasn’t safe to chase them any further and by then I realised I was still wearing my pyjamas and was in major difficulties if the police caught me in the park. I went home and took the bed back up onto the porch, then went and got my daughter’s bicycle chain and chain leg of the bed to the concrete pillar on the porch. I’d like to see them try and take that away.

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Grandmothers gift part 2

After cleaning out her bedroom we went downstairs to the living room which was her favourite room in the house. My grandmother loved to entertain and often had all the neighbours and people from the local community around the large dinners that were known to go through the night and even into the early hours of the next morning. She had a bit of a reputation as a drinker and the local story was that she drank the local cattle baron under the table many years ago as a bet so now she got free meat from his farm for all her big dinners. The living room  is a combined living and dining room and I remembered many of those dinner parties with people sitting at the table eating and drinking while lots of other people mingled in the living room. She had been particularly proud of a silver cutlery set she had been given by her husband 30 or 40 years ago and which now sat in the downstairs drawer waiting for somebody to take them home. My wife went downstairs to find the cutlery set and I kept cleaning up the kitchen. Suddenly I heard a cry and my wife called from me to come downstairs to see what she had discovered. Behind the cutlery set my wife had pulled out a large silver candelabra which was covered in cobwebs and rusty around the base. I suddenly remembered that this candelabra had graced the centre of her dining table during all those famous dinner parties she had held through the decades. I actually felt quite teary remembering how she had  light the candles every Christmas when the family came to dinner. My wife was energetically cleaning the rust off the base and she said that she felt with some good polishing and tender loving care that she could have it back to its pristine best. I feel quite excited at the idea that the next Christmas dinner at my house will feature this beautiful object in the middle of the table with all of her children having Christmas lunch and remembering her

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My Grandmothers last gift

It took us nearly 2 hours to get to my grandmother’s home, because it was way out in the bush located under a mountain range that I remembered from my childhood. My grandmother had died two weeks before and my wife and I were making the trip down to her home for the last time. She had been a strong woman bearing seven children who in turn had given her 31 grandchildren. But now at the age of 91 she had finally died from a heart attack while sitting in her favourite chair on the front porch looking out over the acreage. My wife and I had been chosen by the family to come clean out the house as we lived only two hours away whereas the rest of them lived interstate. The house was just as I remembered it, full of photos of her children and even many of the grandchildren which took up most of the wall above the staircase. I wasn’t looking forward to going through all the things and we had made a deal with the rest of the family that all the furniture and most of the goods other than personal items would be given to charity. so we brought an empty suitcase with us thinking that we would only be bringing back some small items. It was hard going through all her clothes realising that she wouldn’t wear them ever again, and even her shoes looked lonely. My wife cleaned out all the drawers in her bedroom and I went through a number of small boxes she had put at the back of her  closet. Most of the boxes had even more photographs dating back 30 or 40 years so I put them aside planning on keeping them for the family. A small box at the back called my attention, and when I opened it I found three pearl rosary beads that had been her favourites throughout  her life. My wife was thrilled with the discovery because she is a catholic herself and was overjoyed at the thought of doing the Rosary on her grandmothers beads.