Loons, 127 years, and a Lion Paw Table

Today Mom took me up to PopPop's old house. Eventually it'll be sold, but right now every one's going through and taking things that are meaningful to them and we are getting ready to have the community yard sale this Saturday and clear out all the things that no one wants that we are sure aren't worth that much anyway. Like the garden gnomes. And the old camera from the 80's. And the Pyrex dishes that have so many scratches in them they aren't fit for baking. We went up today for another reason though, we went up to continue the restoration work on my table. That table has been in the house nearly since it was built and it holds a lot of memories for me. It's a genuine 'lion paw' table, each of the four legs are carved to resemble lion legs, and the foot of each leg is a lion paw. My family has celebrated countless birthdays, anniversaries, Mother's Day's, Father's Day's, 4th of July's at that house and we always gather around those deep carved paws. Meals were eaten on that table, cards were played on that table, Trivial Pursuit was played on that table, play dough and paper machete and crayons and markers all were used on that table. But what I remember the most, the strongest, is hiding under that table and hugging the wooden paws pretending they were Aslan's feet and feeling safe there during thunderstorms.

Over the years, sitting in the dinning room in all that humidity and moisture, somehow the tablecloth that had been atop the lovely wood became fused to it ( and it was one of those wretched tablecloths that have the green furriness underneath ) so before anything else can be done to or for the table, that green gunk has to be scrapped off. And boy howdy is it ever a job! Mom and I used goo-off or something like it and plastic spatulas (never to be cooked with again) and the going was super slow. We had to wait for the goo off to soak into the light green film of fuzz over the wood before even attempting to scrape. And then, we'd scrape scrape scrape and only get a few centimeters of the green stuff off. The longer we waited, however, the better the stuff came off and when we waited almost an hour, we were able to get long sections to come up. Today we got about a third of the table scraped, and I'll be going back up there this week or next to take another stab at removing that awful film.

After lunch we went up into the attic, and we found PopPop's year book from 1933 and MomMom's from 1925. One was a college year book, the other high school. But all the girls looked so glamorous there! Like something out of the silver screen! And all the college guys with their hair just so and their serious, non-smiling faces, they might as well have been film stars too. But the best thing we found wasn't in the year books, it was in another photo album, the kind with the sticky pages and the clear film that flips down over them to keep them in place. It was a marriage licence, dated 1880! The horrible thing was that it had been stuck to the stickiness of the photo album sheets, and either it fell into four pieces or it was torn into four pieces to fit in the pages. Mom and I almost cried. I mean it's a piece of family history over 127 years old and that is how it was being kept?! *AH*

Anyway, we are now looking into having it professionally cleaned, mounted, and framed. I mean there's no monetary value in it, seeing as it's in four pieces but it was a real wow just to be able to look at it once we pieced it back together.

Before we left the house, Mom and I went and sat out on the porch (having finished our mile walk for the day) we were relaxing and talking and suddenly there was a great commotion out on the river. A pair of loons (and I do mean the birds) were fishing. At least, we think they were fishing. They were smacking the surface of the water with their wings, and then dunking themselves under the surface, and bobbing up several feet from where they started. This went on for over an hour, water going every which way, loons diving, loud annoying sounds echoing off the water. Granted it's only about five feet deep between piers and such but they ruckus they made with the wing slapping seemed to get everything wet.

Now I know what it means to be 'crazy as a loon'