Summer Place - Part Twenty-Five

Summer Place

Part Twenty-Five

            During the following morning; the EARLY of the following morning… I slipped unnoticed into my own barn and… closed the door behind me.  Sleeping, sleepy, computerized, emailed, televisioned and self centereds …protected me.  Protects me.

            I had not lain awake pondering my plunder.  I had not ‘look at’ my plunder.  I unloaded truck as FAST AS I COULD.  I mounded.  I took the ‘good stuff’ from the truck cap and helter-skelter concealed it ‘in’ the “mounded”.  I said nothing.  I pointed to nothing.  I ‘kept moving’ and was back and forth with the second and third truck loads… helter-skelter… while the others of the home front peeked, poked, peeked, fumbled, almost fussed, stood back, peeked, figured, walked about, configured, walked around… the mound… and… left.  No one at the dinner table said anything… about anything… antique.  At the “EARLY” of the following morning, I had distance from ‘all that’.  It was my mounds.

            That I sorted?

            Sort of ‘sorted’.  I suppose.  Simply, due to the function of the ‘my antiques business’ and the prolonged decades of my ‘doing that’… I really …simply… fished out the good stuff and absconded with that while… keeping the mounds reinvented as new mounds of different grade “huh” antiques to be ‘SOLD’ “NOW”.  No one would have missed my ‘abscond’ selections.  I moved those to a side shed ‘on the barn’; my kindling shed, to ‘look at’, ‘disperse’ and… make disappear… into the multiple catacomb of giant mounds that be ‘my antiques business’.

            MOST of THIS ‘IT’ of plunder gleaned ‘good stuff’… for I was done with the reinvented truck load mounds… was not the ‘good’ in monetary value… or in lay antiquarian interest.  For I… though… the touchy-feely cobwebs in my hair from the discerning-on-site of the day before… purveyed a foundation of object intrigue clarity… to build on… and savor.

            YES I destroyed the site in clap-of-thunder speed.  Yes… but yes… I KNEW THIS at the time.  “OH GOSH I HAVE BEEN DOING THIS SO LONG that the life of preserver lands in the water NEXT to me to GRAB and HOLD while…

            I be like the Hermit Thrush in deep wood singing my six bar song… too?  Alone?  I have yet, for near fifty years, have an ‘anybody’ ‘show up’.  At clap-of-thunder speed.  So I knew my inner soul truth of site destroyed with it’s ‘that they be’ and acted accordingly.  What I understood… at the site at the time… was there I stood WITHIN the closed moments of Compass Parker and his wife… Sophia… WHEN I STOOD at the chamber fireplace.  THAT was a ‘last use of the site’ “BY THEM”.  The closing moment is ‘when they died’… and the new mansion took over for ‘ever after’.  THEIR end was THERE… at that chamber fireplace… UNDISTURBED for nearly two centuries… IF NOT TWO centuries.  I had …find, found, identified, purloined to safety and KNEW IT THEN… the Sophia’s teapot.  IN this mound poke of my morning came ‘more’.

            To itemize and amplify the ‘each antique’ is stupid and drifts away from saga.  As I said, most of the ‘good stuff’ was not a ‘that good’ in cash value.  EVEN this teapot is not a CASH VALUE…; maybe five hundred… maybe six hundred… maybe only FOUR… hundred:  “GET YOUR GREEDY cash grabbing HANDS off of it.  Thank-you.”

            To use another example of plunder there found:  I gathered up four ‘Paul Revere’ pierced tin lanterns ‘at site’.  They are so normal to be a BE THERE… that this they be become but non-descript to an antiquarian like I?  EXCEPT that I turn to saga… to legend… to soul… to GHOST to… KEEP:  A ‘the keeper for ME …of the ‘ALL OF THIS’ “I FOUND” within a… summer place.  What I horribly knew was that those lanterns were the candle lights of the home… that bumped along and around with their lighted candle illumination for the two decades of residency of Compass and Sophia AND they probably brought them WITH THEM ‘when they moved in’ TOO.  So Sophia lantern lighted her table at dawn, after rousting fire from embers, while Compass took one with him ‘to the barn’ AND when he went outside… to pee.  (Sophia took one with her to pee… too).  Upon the circle of saga found at the chamber fireplace the lanterns were found together being the THAT VERY SAME together that THEY HAD BEEN… together… with Compass and Sophia for the… together… of eternity.  Do I be the dashing rogue to be the ‘sell them’?

            Well… after a while… maybe.  But that morning in the barn alone …with my grandmother’s ghost peeking over my shoulder and gripping ever tighter my scruff-of-neck… no.  Precious they were found to be and I … to ‘look at’, ‘disperse’ and… ‘make disappear’.  I know where they are and you don’t.  EVEN if one takes one’s sunglasses out of one’s hair, dear Summer Place… ‘you don’t’.

            I found a cup and saucer to mate with Sophia’s teapot.  Yes… creamware Queen’s ware, King’s rose decorated …a cup and saucer.  Sophia’s.

            I found her bowl.  Too.  HER BOWL to be with HIS BOWL.  Hers is just a little smaller.  A little smaller.  So… ‘nests’.  She too, her lips to touch rim “I show you” (Part Twelve-C).  I… stunned (?) to capture THAT after FIFTY YEARS of ‘ago’ my grandmother returned home with HIS (Part Six).  I peeked at them through the fuzzy distance of centuries… and half centuries.  I set them, together again, aside on my own ‘old shelf there’.  I see them.  I do.