Faith, Folklore, and Friends

When our granddaughter, Amanda, was about five years old, we found this bike at a yard sale for $5.  It had a cute seat on it then, and Poppy bought the horn for it.  It stayed here, and Amanda rode it up and down the driveway thousands of times. Amanda is sixteen now, and drives her car named Harold. The bike had been stored until recently, when we pulled it out of the spider webs and washed it off.  Poppy had already removed the seat when I remembered to take a photo. Poppy painted the whole thing white, then added a galvanized bucket that was ruined inside (he knew I would never let him use a good bucket).  He somehow welded it on to the bicycle frame. It is now in the flower bed in front of our porch, among the roses and the peonies. Poppy steadied it up by adding some metal pipes.  I added the fern, which should spread out and cover the bucket by the end of the summer. I get to keep the bike a little longer without feeling gui...

I had this beautiful old cake plate, but it had a chip in the side, so I never used it. This pie plate was a gift from many years ago.  I haven't used it in years, but I didn't want to part with it. I found this retro glass vase at a yard sale somewhere in Tennessee.  It was 25 cents, and I knew I was bound to need it someday. Hub used this Gorilla Glue to stick them all together. Here they are, holding a plant on the front porch.  Hub used the spray white paint from Walmart that set us back 99 cents plus tax. How cool is that?  Last week, I found an old lamp base . . .

Old light fixture from a yard sale: $1. Rope from the Dollar Tree: $1 Vintage pulley from estate sale: $14 Candles: 8 for $2.50 Enjoying these night lights: Priceless!

I remember my Grandma Gean planting portulaca every spring in a battered-up dishpan.  She patched the little holes that wore into the aluminum until it couldn't be patched anymore, then it became a flower pot. She would fill the dishpan with rich dirt and plant portulaca seed she had saved from the previous year.  The common name for portulaca is moss rose, but the rose part had been lost, so we just called it moss.  Grandma wasn't trying to impress anyone by recycling, and if we had asked her if she was going green, she would have looked at us like we were crazy. She did it because she had a soul that required beautiful things around her, and she wasn't going to be denied by a little thing like poverty. So when Hub found a new used wheelbarrow at an auction, he was ready to take this one to the dump.  Instead, we put a little topsoil in it and bought a pack of portulaca seed. We can move it around with the sun, or in spots that need a little extra c...