If you have two loaves of bread sell one and buy flowers. For although the bread will nourish your body, the flowers will nourish your soul.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Two Tops and Silver

One of our family's favorite things about the arrival of fall, is the steady agenda of fall festivals. There is one close by almost every weekend. The first one of the season is Two Tops...food, music, tractor and horse pulls, crafts, food (oh, I said that already, didn't I?), and.....fleas! 



Okay...we arrive. And the first stand I walk up to has a utensil organizer with tarnished and dirty silverplate in it. I ask...how much?  "Oh...50 cents apiece."  Cool, I think to myself, and pick out one place setting. $2.50.  Pretty good!  While I'm picking them out he says..."Or you can have the whole thing for $5." I assume you can figure out how long I hesitated on that one.  I walked away with 1 knife, 3 tablespoons, 11 teaspoons, 5 dinner forks, and 7 dessert forks of Community silver plate in 1932 Lady Hamilton pattern. 


I love the magical transformation that takes place with a little silver polish.



Also included was the heavy duty, perfect condition stainless steel utensil tray which cleaned up beautifully, a few miscellaneous pieces, and this cute little brass thingamajig with a lid that unscrews. 

As I polished it up, I rubbed extra hard in case there was a teensy tiny little genie in there.  No....

On Beauty



In the last few years I have grown more aware of a need for beauty in our lives. As I experience His creation I think, God could have created a functional world with just our survival needs being met.  But He did so much more than that.  He gave us incredible beauty. And He instilled in us a desire and need for it. We need a protective structure to live in, but we also want our home to be a beautiful sanctuary.  There is a lot of ugliness in our world. We need to balance it with loveliness when we can. Not for the sake of having "things", but to remind us of the wonder of His provision.  We have become a society of fast foods, plastic and busy-ness.  Don't get me wrong...my husband and I often eat on paper plates in front of the TV. And when our four children were still living at home we were on the go a lot. But I feel more and more that we need to sometimes take the time to pull out that "good china" that sits in our china cupboards, use those precious hand stitched linens that grandma madeand leisurely converse with friends and family...surrounded with beauty.  As we go through our daily activities we need to be able to rest our eyes for a moment on that wonderful photo we snapped on the day trip we took with the kids that was so much fun.  Or catch a whiff of the fresh flowers on the table as we pass by. Or pause, just to enjoy the beauty of a vignette we created with some of our favorite things.

One recent evening, after a long day, I had a glass of a special gingerale my sister shared with me. I was in shorts and tee shirt with my bare feet propped up. But I drank it out of a gorgeous etched glass goblet.  I felt like a queen.  ;)