Trending
When Honey and I go on vacation we always hit the yard sales and thrift shops.
That's exactly what we did when we visited Worshrag and Busy Bee over Thanksgiving at their new house in a suburb of Fayetteville, N.C., where our son has taken a new job strength-training soldiers in the 82nd Airborne Division at the Ft. Bragg Army base.
This time, though, we had a special mission: helping the newlyweds fill their new home with furniture and other household needs. If I may say so, we helped quite a lot.
"TRUTHFULLY, THEIR HOUSE is nicer than ours or her parents'," my wife said.
It is a tri-level, with three steps up from a front sitting room and three steps up from the living room to the kitchen. The house is only 23 years old, but the previous owners had completely renovated the interior, with new floors, kitchen, fixtures, paint throughout, and a new HVAC system.
Why sell a house you've just renovated? The reason was divorce, which is always a very sad thing. They met the wife, who took a liking to them. She loved the house, and it meant something to her that they did, too.
The house has a brick exterior and is located in an upscale subdivision where the houses are all different, not the cookie-cutter houses we see so often in the newer Pittsburgh suburbs.
The backyard is roomy and fenced, providing their new puppy Millicent with a safe place to run and play.
"You have persimmons!" I announced happily to Worshrag after I toured the backyard.
"I know. I'd like to cut them down," he replied.
"No!" I objected.
A wooded border of the back yard includes big southern pines and three wild (as opposed to cultivated) persimmon trees. The persimmons were bare of leaves but thick with hanging fruit, and fallen fruit littered the ground. The first one I tried was not quite ripe, making my mouth dry and puckered like alum does, but there were plenty that were dead ripe. Delicious!
They are mushy and do track in, which is Worshrag's objection. The persimmon is a common tree in my mother Ol' Food's hometown of Hamlin, W.Va., so I like them out of sentiment, too.
BUSY BEE had already obtained very good second-hand pieces including two leather couches (one with double recliners) and an overstuffed chair from a Habitat for Humanity Re-Store. She found another recliner from a yard sale.
Honey and I arrived Friday before Thanksgving, and took Busy Bee yard-saling on Saturday; all four of us went to sales Sunday, scoring a china hutch, lamps, end tables, drapes and other furniture. We had to strap the top section of the hutch to the roof rack of our SUV.
Worshrag worked Monday and Tuesday while we hit the thrift stores, finding the most success back at the Re-Store, where Busy Bee bought a large dresser, another hutch and so many other items that we had to rent a U-Haul.
In-between were multiple trips to Wal-Mart and Lowe's for tools such as an Allen wrench set to tighten the legs on end tables, and supplies like screws, nails and light bulbs. As a bachelor living a minimalist existence, Worshrag did not accumulate much in the way of tools.
One thing the previous owners had not gotten around to was installing a new garbage disposal, which I did with Worshrag's assistance.
On Tuesday, Busy Bee's dad Ike and mom Suzy Q drove down from Monroeville, followed shortly after by their son, Busy Bee's younger sibling. We four men moved furniture, hung drapes, fixed broken drawers and so on, while the three women thoroughly scrubbed the used hutches, dresser and tables with Murphy's Oil Soap and shined them up with furniture polish, before turning their attention to preparations for Thanksgiving dinner.
WORSHRAG, 32, has been away and on his own for many years, so our main emotion upon seeing him go was happiness for his new wife and new life.
Busy Bee is the first child out of the nest for Ike and Suzy Q, however. The other day when Honey gave her mother some condiments the kids left in the apartment 'fridge, Suzy Q got all weepy.
"This is her mustard," she said, cradling the jar.
When our two families sat down together for Thanksgiving, Suzy Q teared up again.
"This is her first Thanksgiving dinner," she said.
Yeah, well, so it was. Can't say I got misty-eyed over installing their first garbage disposal, but it did make me happy to be of help to our children. You never get over being a parent.
(Fred Miller's book of 100 stories, "Falling Under Honey's Spell," is $10, available locally at Connie's Kitchen, Davis Bros. Pharmacies, Frank's Pastry, Giant Eagle Calcutta, Museum of Ceramics, and Pottery City Antique Mall.)