Retirement Travel and a Weird Mix of Other Stuff
I’m really glad we got to throw them a party to celebrate their 50th.
Ultimately, they were married for 53 years and 4 days. Quite an achievement, eh?
The key ingredient is Annie Sloan Chalk Paint (ASCP). No, I haven’t tried other brands of chalk paint. Why would I? This stuff is fabulous. It’s versatile, sticks to just about any surface you can imagine, can be used to achieve a wide variety of looks… rustic, modern, distressed, white-washed, pickled, etc… comes in all sorts of cool colors. And the wax, formulated to work with the paint, it wonderful, too.
I am not just recommending ASCP because I really happen to like Janet, my local stockist, and her shop (The Empty Nest). I seriously love this stuff. I’ve tried lots of different paints on furniture before. Regular later house paint, spray paint, acrylic craft paint, etc. But have never been able to achieve satisfying results. Oh, how much nicer those wood cabinets in our WV kitchen would have looked if I’d discovered ASCP years ago.
Wanna learn more about ASCP? CLICK HERE.
I never know what my project will look like when finished. I mean, I start with a base color I love.But once you start applying the wax, the piece changes. I always tell people, when I am doing a piece with ASCP, I feel like it is evolving before my eyes. The clear wax, although thinly applied, gives the paint so much more depth. And the dark wax? Oh, I love me some dark wax. Even if it is messy as all get-out. The dark wax is what really gives the piece character.
I’m getting ahead of myself, though.
First, I had to find a small table. I got soooo lucky. It only took three stops before I found this ugly, but perfectly sized kitchen table at a local thrift shop. It set me back a whopping $25. The legs are real wood, but the top is Formica-covered.
Janet assured me I’d just have to rough-up the top a bit to give the paint a surface to grip. The sanding took about 30 seconds. Literally.
I’ve had these chairs in my basement for a while. I didn’t have a specific use for them when Dad gave them to me a while back. But I knew he didn’t have a use for them either, and he was clearing out, so I took them. They belonged to his grandfather, Pappy. Dad had gotten them stripped years ago and had tried repairing them, but they were in rough shape.
They would have looked absolutely horrible stained. And, to be honest, I was afraid they would even look bad once painted.
I sanded the chairs a bit first, since there were so rough, but sanding is rarely required with ASCP (depending on the surface).
They actually took the paint quite well. Even though I was using a light color of paint — Old Ochre — you couldn’t see all the wood putty and other imperfections under the surface.
Ignore that Behr paint on the workbench. Hubby was using it for some other project. It is NOT on my furniture. It is his workbench, after all.
The table took the paint beautifully.
I had to take a picture so you could see the difference between one coat and two coats of paint (toward bottom).
The table legs and leaves had already been treated with the clear wax. The larger surface of the table had not yet been waxed.
That shot immediately above shows the difference between clear wax and dark wax.
I could have left it alone after applying the clear wax, but I wanted a more aged look. So I applied the dark wax, too.
The table was done! Or so I thought.
As I was applying the clear wax to the first chair, I couldn’t help but think it needed some color. Yes, the dark wax would be adding some color, but I thought it needed something else. I didn’t want to get too crazy with color, since this was being done for my Dad, but it was just missing something.
So I added a bit of Olive to the chair. I loved it. But once I sat the chair beside the table, I realized the table needed accenting, too. That’s what I mean about evolving…
Yep, that bit of Olive was exactly what the chair and table needed.
See how the dark wax gets in all the nooks and crannies, highlighting the imperfections. That’s what adds character. If you are looking for a cleaner, more-modern, or more-finished look, don’t use the dark wax.
I really do feel as if I just finished an art project. Not to say that this is a masterpiece or anything, it just feels like I have given these things new life. I mean, you can’t deny the transformation.
I did remove some of the dark wax from the top of the table before pronouncing the project complete. I liked the look, but a table-top should look clean. And I thought it sort of looked grungy.
How cute is that? 🙂
The most-important part? Dad really likes his new-to-him table and made-over chairs.
Now you know how it’s done. What do you think?
Grandmammy, as she elected to be called after Eric (my youngest) was born, was a cool lady.
She had a great sense of humor. She and I shared many laughs over the years.
My favorite story about her, which makes me smile every time I think about it, happened around 1990. She would have been 77 at the time, assuming I have my year exactly right.
She and I had many road trips together. We were on the way home from my brother’s house in Chesapeake, Virginia, cruising up I-95 in my little red Ford Escort. We were motoring along pretty good. I was in the left lane, attempting to pass a tractor-trailer, when he pulled in front of me.
I hit the brakes and said, “He cut me off!”
No biggie. It wasn’t that close and I wasn’t hugely po’ed or anything. But once he moved over and I was in the process of passing him, I elbowed Grandma (as I called her) gently and said, “Give him the finger.”
I was totally joking.
But, as we passed the cab of the truck, something on Grandma’s side of the car caught my eye. I glanced over and saw her giving the guy the finger. She was hunched over a bit, as if trying to do it on the sly, giggling the whole time. I was hysterical. Really. Almost peed my pants.
I could only imagine the trucker looking down as we rode by, seeing this little old lady flipping him the bird.
Grandma’s mind was sharp as a tack, but her body was failing her. She had a hip replacement in the late 80s, which helped, but as she got older, it became harder and harder for her to get around.
I love all of those pictures, which I took on a day trip the three of us had taken to Brookside Gardens on the outskirts of Washington, DC.
Here’s a shot captured on Christmas, 2006.
Times does move on, but I think of her often. Along with my Mom. And Aunt Susan, Mom’s oldest sister, who succumbed to cancer in July 2011.
Aunt Kathy, yes, I was named after her, is the only sister left.
And there I am with Grandma on Christmas, 2007. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that that Christmas would be her last.
I still miss her, of course. But am lucky to have many, many fond memories of the times we shared. Memories that, more often than not, make me laugh.
If your Grandma is still living, and close by, give her a hug for me today, okay? We were lucky to have her with us as long as we did.
I’m pretty sure that was the last picture taken of her. I actually got it out of her camera after she passed. Her health was poor. She’d been slowly deteriorating since 1993 when she was diagnosed with Scleroderma. I remember thinking that she was looking very thin and frail, but she’d been sick for so long, we just never expected it to catch up with her when it did.
Here’s a picture from better times. It was taken in August 2006 at my daughter Amy’s wedding reception.
Anyway… as that August date approaches, I can’t help but marvel at all the changes that have taken place since she passed. All the stuff she’s missed.
I’ve been looking forward to this Saturday’s one-year anniversary celebration with mixed feelings. The event marks my friend Janet’s first full year in business at her store, The Empty Nest. Mom really enjoyed the blog post I did about the grand opening last year. She said several times, she wished she felt better so she could come down to Warrenton to see The Empty Nest and meet Janet in person. She would have loved the store and Janet, too.
This morning, I dug out Mom’s punch bowl, which Janet is borrowing for the party. Ironic, right? Mom won’t be there, but her punch bowl will.
Do people even buy punch bowls anymore? Mom was proud of hers. I had to chuckle as I took it from its original box. It came from McCrory’s. The $13.99 price was written on the box in black magic marker.
I hardly ever see those things used. My mother-in-law always gets hers out at Christmas to serve her “famous” sherbet punch.
What else has Mom missed? The biggest event was Eric’s wedding in April. She had really, REALLY been looking forward to that.
This next pic always makes me cry. Mom so should have been in that shot.
Even if you can’t see her in the photo, we know she was there in spirit.
The other BIG event was Dad’s move to Pennsylvania. She would have been so happy living in PA, too, and I know she’s thrilled for Dad.
There have been lots of other small changes, too. Not changes, really. Just things that I haven’t been able to tell her about. Shannon’s exploration of Central America. Amy’s big move.
I always enjoyed entertaining her with stories.
I love that shot of Mike with the grand kids. They were headed for the airport. He was chaperoning them during the flight to their new home. (Their parents drove.)
This has been a crazy year. So many friends have lost loved one. Parents. Friends. Dogs. A former co-worker of mine recently succumbed to kidney cancer. While we weren’t very close over the past several years, I still felt her passing.
Okay, time to end this post. It’s gotten far too depressing. And there’s work to be done.
Life goes on, right?
Moving into a new place and unpacking can be a bit overwhelming. It always helps to have a voice of reason when one comes across something they’re not sure whether they should keep or toss. Especially when the previous owners left a bunch of stuff behind. Lots of good stuff, but also a bunch of things Dad really does not need.
Since work was really busy last week and I worked some long hours, my boss said I could leave early on Friday. It was 2:30 by the time I set out. I hadn’t planned on taking the bike, but the weather was gorgeous. So I said to myself, “Why not?” It’s only about a 150-mile trip.
The weather looked gorgeous, but it was hot. Temps were only in the 80s, but I was wearing full riding gear. After several hours in the saddle, with a few short rest stops thrown in, I decided a stop at Jim Mack’s Ice Cream was in order.
Jim Mack’s Ice Cream was established in 1958. They still make the ice cream on the premises and have expanded the menu to include burgers, hot-dogs, french fries and more.
Jim Mack’s is not just an ice cream shop. It’s a destination. I always like to look around while there.
But first, I NEEDED an ice cream. When I stepped inside, I was quite surprised and pleased to see this.
I LOVE pretzels. Those soft pretzels were tempting, but I already had my heart set on ice cream. I just had to try a pretzel cone.
I only got a small ice cream, which was a mix of chocolate marshmallow topped with mint chocolate chip. It was amazing. Especially when I got down near the cone and could taste the salt from the pretzel cone as I lapped up the chocolate marshmallow.
While I ate my ice cream, I nosed around. What a funny little place.
Dad’s house was still  about 30 minutes away. So I didn’t linger long.
I just love the view from the front of his place.
The air was quite, um, fresh.
Saturday morning, we both slept until after 8, which is a rare treat for me. (Hubby had the dogs with him at the WV place.)
Then we started clearing out. We took a bunch of stuff to Goodwill, hit Five Guys for lunch, and then I bought Dad a pressure washer. He’d never used one. I couldn’t wait to show him what it could do.
His place was a bit dirty on the outside. It’s in the middle of farmland, after all. The exterior walls were covered in dust. Especially under the roof of the deck. Knowing how much he’d enjoy sitting out there, I wanted to brighten it up for him.
The lighting makes it hard to see, but to the left of the door had already been sprayed when I took this shot.
This next image will give you a better appreciation of the difference.
See what I mean? I did all of the walls, the railings, the deck. Basically, if it was standing still, I hit it with the pressure washer.
After doing that for a few hours, I cleaned myself up a bit, then Dad took Aunt Bertha and I over to nearby Mount Joy for a dinner at Gus’s Keystone Family Restaurant. It’s a great place. Home-cooking type food, like a diner, but nicer. I was delighted to see they now serve beer.
I made Dad stop on the way back to his house so I could take this picture at the Reist Popcorn Company…
I didn’t know it at the time, but Reist is “the eastern most popcorn processor in the country.”
On Sunday’s agenda was more pressure washing. But first, Aunt Bertha went for a short, 35-mile ride.
In case you forgot, Aunt Bertha is the cool aunt with the Can Am Spyder.
We’d never ridden together, so we seized the opportunity.
Dad was kind enough to take that picture before we left.
It was a gorgeous morning.
Aunt Bertha picked a lovely spot to stop and rest.
While we were there, I had to snag a couple shots of the two of us.
The sun was really bright, so the lighting was a bit challenging.
On the way back to Dad’s, the sky was amazing. There was this really cool bank of clouds I kept watching. Lucky for me, when we got back to the park, the cloud bank was behind the neighboring farm. So I captured this nice shot.
The clock was ticking, so I got right to pressure washing.
I did the chairs first, then moved on to the patio.
There were thunderstorms looming (notice the sky on the after side of the previous image?), so I didn’t dally. I kept an eye on the radar as I ate lunch. I almost altered my planned route home, but the storms were sparsely scattered. So I kept to my agenda.
My first stop was the Haines Shoe House. Finally. I still can’t believe I’d never been there before. It’s 20 minutes from Dad’s new house.
There’s an ice cream parlor in the heel, but they were getting ready to close. It was almost 4:00 by then, too, so I needed to skedaddle.
By that time, the storms had passed and the sky was a rich, gorgeous blue. But it was hot. In the upper 80s the whole way home. I made a few drink stops, but that’s it. I was sweaty and miserable under all my gear. Safety first, though. I’d rather be hot and uncomfortable temporarily than missing a bunch of skin forever if I crashed.
I did manage to take one picture that perfectly captured the contrasting colors I enjoyed during the ride.
After one final stop in Purcellville, Virginia, about an hour from Warrenton…
…I made it home.
How’s that for a busy and varied weekend?
It felt great to ride, despite the heat. I think I need to go back for another visit. Soon.
He grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Located in south-central PA, Lancaster County is a bucolic area of rolling hills studded with farms and old homesteads. Like everywhere else in the Northeastern US, it’s grown by leaps and bounds. But many of the farms remain. There are pockets of “civilization” (urban areas and suburban sprawl), but many, many farms remain. So it’s kept its country feel.
Mom’s family was from Pennsylvania, too, but her parents moved to Baltimore in the early1940s for work. When they married, Mom and Dad lived in Lancaster County for a while, but there were more employment opportunities in Baltimore. And Mom wanted to be closer to family. So, when I was 18 months old, they moved to Baltimore. I was about 5 when they moved into the house on Federal Street, a small row-house on the outskirts of the city.
We were all happy there. It was a great place to grow up. There’s open space across the street from our old house, full of trees, which we always referred to as “the woods.” Unlike many city homes, surrounded by other houses, busy streets, traffic, etc., it was a great environment for kids. There was never a shortage of things to do, places to explore, other kids to play with. It was fun. I have many fond memories of growing up there. So does my brother. It was an era when we played outside pretty much from dawn until dusk. Our curfew was ruled by the timing of the streetlights. When they came on, we knew it was time to go inside for the day.
By the time I moved out in the late-80s, things in the city had really started to deteriorate. Crime. Pollution. Overcrowding. Urban decay.
Of course, my parents always maintained their home very nicely, so the house remained well-kept. And it’s situated in this odd little neighborhood where time sort of stands still.
There’d been talk over the years of us moving to Pennsylvania. We visited Dad’s family in Lancaster often. But Dad was a blue collar worker and my parents never had a whole lot of extra money to spare. Then, in 1993, the year I got married, my Mom was diagnosed with scleroderma, a rare auto-immune disease. Simply explained, it means hardening of the skin, but it’s a systemic disease with far-reaching and varied complications.
As luck would have it, their house was a stone’s throw from Johns Hopkins. One of the world’s leading experts in scleroderma is based there. As much as I would have liked to see them move out of the city, Mom needed to be close to her doctors. She was lucky to live as long as she did after being diagnosed.
Dad never complained. He rarely voiced an opinion about hating the city and wanting to move. But I knew how he felt. The country is in his soul.
After Mom passed, I knew we needed to move him. We had options, of course. He could have gone to live near my brother in the Tidewater Virginia area. Or he could have come to live near us in Warrenton. But he doesn’t know these areas like he knows PA. And as lovely as it is in both places, he would never have felt at home.
Dad comes from a family of nine children. There were three boys and six girls. His two brothers have passed and, although his five sisters remain, he’s only really close to two of them, Bertha and Pearl.
Bertha has lived in this cute little trailer park for close to 20 years. Pearl moved into the same park late last year after her husband died. They also have a cousin, Amos, who lives there with his wife, Mellie.
It’s a very well-kept, smallish, 55+, community surrounded by farmland that just happens to be within about a 15-mile radius of where he grew up.  I knew it would be the perfect spot for Dad. So I told Aunt Bertha to keep her eyes open for units hitting the market.
It was fate, plain and simple, the way it all worked out.
Back in late-February, Aunt Bertha took a driving vacation to visit some friends in South Carolina and her son in North Carolina. She stopped here for a visit on her way back to PA. Before she left, I didn’t know much about the friends she was visiting. As it turned out, Hal and Dixie, were neighbors who had a house in the same park as Bertha AND a summer home in South Carolina. Hal and Dixie are in their late-70s/early 80s. They’d recently learned that their daughter, who also lived in PA, was moving to New Mexico. And they were going to go with her sometime in May or June.
I asked Bertha about their house. It wasn’t on the market yet, but the way she described it, it sounded like it would be a good spot for Dad.
The following weekend just happened to be my annual girlfriend getaway weekend in Pennsylvania. Since I’d be in the neighborhood, I asked Bertha to see if she could get the keys so I could check the place out. I wanted to make sure it was a nice place and affordable before even mentioning it to Dad. It was. I took a bunch of pictures, printed them and placed them in a small album, then stopped to see Dad on my way home after the weekend.
Remember, he’d not talked about moving for quite some time. Mainly because he never thought he would be able to afford it.
Sometimes it pays to have a scheming set of kids.
When I got to his house, I told him I had to stop by and give him a surprise. As I turned over the various goodies I’d bought for him during my PA weekend, I eased into the subject of moving. We’d just told him a week or two prior that my son, Eric, would be moving to Hawaii soon. So I knew there wouldn’t be much to keep him in Baltimore. But even I was surprised when my “it’s time to convince you to move” was met with his “it wouldn’t take much convincing.”
He was more surprised than me, though, when I said, “Good, because I found you a house.”
“You found me a house?” he said, incredulous.
I showed him the photo album I’d prepared, but didn’t tell him where it was. Once we got to the end of the album, he was quite intrigued. When I told him it was five doors down from Bertha, he was really excited.
There was lots to do to get ready — sell his house, pack, arrange for the purchase of the new house, etc. — but I swear I think he started packing that night.
On June 15, we moved him.
My brother is on a work assignment in Georgia and Eric had just started a new job, which meant only Hubby and I were available to help on the Maryland end.
But he didn’t have much big stuff, so we thought it would be doable. We packed the bed and cab of his truck and our truck (both pick-ups) as well as a rented U-Haul.
Here are some shots of his house before we moved the stuff out.
… and after.
It only took about two hours to get the trucks packed.
Then it was off to the storage locker where Dad had stashed some extra belongings before putting the house on the market.
I got to drive the U-Haul. Dad and Hubby drove ahead rather than moving at my slower speed.
I really smiled and even got a little teary-eyed when I crossed the state line.
It was a bit surreal knowing I had most of Dad’s worldly possessions packed in the cargo area and I was delivering them to his new/old home.
The guys were already busy unloading when I arrived. Lucky for us, my cousin Ruth and her boyfriend, Lenny, were there to help unpack. Having two extra helpers sure made things easier.
I didn’t have time to stop for pics of the unpacking process, but it went pretty smoothly.
Soon enough, Dad’s new home was full.
I’ll tell you about my most-recent visit in my next post.
In the cow picture, you can just see Dad’s community in the background. The park really is surrounded by farmland.
I took that last shot from the entrance of the mobile home park. It’s pretty country.
As for Dad, he’s beyond thrilled to be back in PA. I hope he has many, many happy years there.
In my next post, I’ll tell you about my visit this past weekend. He’s settling in nicely. And happy. That’s the important part. The country boy is finally home.