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If you're a Miller and something breaks, you don't throw it away, at least, not right away. You put it up somewhere, to be fixed later. . ."later" often meaning in a generation or two. Or three or four.
If you are a Miller you have no problem with waiting for someone to be born into the family, or married into the family, who knows how to fix whatever it is, and cares enough to go to the trouble.
We Millers are patient, if nothing else.
"Too broke to use and too good to throw away." I'm not sure whether our parents ever used exactly those words, but certainly the concept was inoculated into us from childhood. It would be in Latin on the family crest, if we had a family crest, and if one of our ancestors had known Latin. Probably there is one, but it broke and it's under a rusty five-gallon milk can in a back corner of the chicken house.
If whatever broke was small enough for one or two people to carry it, and it's not so heavy it would fall through the floor, it's in the wash house or the chicken house. There have not been any chickens in the chicken house, nor washing done in the wash house, since my grandparents' day, but there have been a lot of broken things put up in those farm outbuildings, to be fixed later.
If the broken thing was large and-or very heavy, it was put in the barn.
That's what happened with the gourd table.
THE GOURD TABLE is the name it is known by to the current generations of Millers, because we set it up on sawhorses and have used it when we sell pumpkins out of the barn in the fall.
But what it is, is an old wagon bed. A very old wagon bed, I believe.
We started Worshrag's Pumpkin Patch when he was 8. He's now 32 and about to be married. (Marrying young is another thing Millers don't do.) Because Busy Bee, Worshrag's intended, wants to have their wedding reception in the barn, the big, heavy wagon bed had to be moved so I could rebuild that section of floor, and now has to be moved completely out of the barn to make room for 100-plus guests, family members and the wedding party.
Made of oak, the wagon bed is heavy, long and narrow: 14 feet in length and only three feet wide. We know nothing about its history. I never really thought much about it or looked at it closely. It just made an interesting old table on which to display gourds for sale.
"The only thing I can think of is that it was used for hauling lumber," I told my sister Col. Peggy. She thought the same thing.
It was broken, of course. One oaken plank in the bed was cracked in half, and so were two of the five supportive cross-timbers. The two long main timbers on the sides were and are sound, and so was the iron hardware that helps support the bed.
What I would like to believe is that it was used to haul lumber when a man named William Leathem built the barn for Hugh Pugh in 1849, and was abandoned when it broke. It would have been too heavy and narrow for regular farm tasks, and thus there was little incentive to fix it. That's my theory.
IF TRUE, that means that it took 172 years for someone to come along to fix it: namely, me.
Another man would simply have moved the wagon bed out of the way. I knew, however, that this was my opportunity, my moment in time as a Miller, to fix a wonderful broken thing that had been waiting ever so long.
Or, as my wife would put it, this is why my work projects take so long to finish: one thing leads to another.
I fashioned two new cross-timbers out of old oak two-by-fours, fastening them to the main timbers with stout seven-inch carriage bolts. Reasoning that it will never again be used as a wagon, I elected to replace the weathered oak bed with pine to reduce weight. I planed, sanded and stained a half-dozen 14-foot worm-hole pine planks from one of our portable sawmill sessions, and rubbed boiled linseed oil over both wood and iron to seal and preserve them.
The original paint was red, so I used a red mahogany stain on the wagon and the accessory side and end planks, which of course also were squirreled away in the barn, and partly broken.
The bed is now a thing of beauty. The worm holes give it character.
It's so pretty I will try to talk Busy Bee into using it for some purpose at the reception, but I'm not sanguine about my chances. It certainly will make a pretty gourd table at the pumpkin patch this fall, though.
Fred Miller's book of 100 stories, "Falling Under Honey's Spell," is $10 and available locally at Connie's Kitchen, Davis Bros. Pharmacies, Frank's Pastry, Giant Eagle Calcutta, Museum of Ceramics, and Pottery City Antiques.