"It's Been Two Years" - Part One

"It's Been Two Years"

Part One

            It has been two years... since I wrote up a cluster of vignettes (blog posts)... harboring a cluster of local antiques.... dealers, collectors (?) and ... old Maine sea captain family estate heirs.  I recorded a mixture of antiques and antiques trade business within this cluster and... laced it with a subliminal dose of old New England – old Maine... Wasp character points and their ‘playing outs’.   I believed... at the time of writing two years ago... I would be ‘following through’ with more but... the vignettes all went on ...hiatus .

            This does not mean that the character cluster and their antiques ‘were not around’.  In fact, that ...cluster... continued ‘business as usual’ ‘for the whole time’ since my written attention, including an additional whole “summer season” and... TWO “winter seasons”.  I am... and was... ‘in and out’ with all of ‘them’ and ‘their antiques’, sort of, ‘on and off’ and... “here and there”.  It is only the ... old coastal Maine sea captain’s estates and... many other estates of various antiquarian intrigue allover ALL of Maine... emergencies that returns my attention to these ‘old tales’ and their ‘peoples’.

            The emergencies is that this winter has been... ‘long’, ‘cold’ and... although not notably harsh or fierce... ‘a grinder’.  “IT” (‘the winter’) “started early” and “was cold” TOO... ‘through March’.  THAT LAST created the emergencies.  THOSE are:  “The oil tank needs to be filled” ... “again” (one more time before “summer”) (March 1^st to November 15^th is ‘summer’ in Maine... to ‘the real Maine’).  This ‘filled... again’ is:  “I won’t NEED to do that” “with vigilance” “again” (“I turned my furnace OFF.”).  This year most are having to... have... an ‘extra fill’.  The specific emergency is the “PAYING FOR THAT”; the “OIL”.  At an out-of-the-gate cost for a ‘fill’ of, say, $677.85... creeping up to say... $800.00 including coastal estate owners reporting “it was costing me sixty-five dollars a day to”  HEAT my house...:  It is, at the least, in many circles... the TALK of “EMERGENCY”.

            This ‘emergency’ has caused me to have contact ‘with everybody’ of the vignette cluster AND have something to say about this contact... AND... to say about... the annual seasonal transition (winter to summer)... ‘in the trade... and... “laced it with a subliminal dose of old New England – old Maine... Wasp character points and their ‘playing outs’...” too.

            Therefore... and to begin... I repost a cluster of relevant vignettes (blog posts) that bring out the characters, and their antiques, that I will be speaking of.  It is a chance for review for some readers, a chance for ‘useful background’ for other readers and... a reminisce of the ‘subliminal dose of old New England....’ ...too.

            The characters are Cadence Snow and her sister Helen (Snow) Cransmore, both heirs of the Captain Snow estate mansion "Defiance", James Hutton, a ‘best grade’ local antiques picker and Peggy Abbott , the local antiques collector-dealer.  The locations are the Snow family estate, a ‘sea captain’s mansion’, Helen Cransmore’s home, the open-in-the-summer-sea-coast-village located ‘The Gallery’ antiques store... and a few other antiques pickers... with their trucks ‘backed-up’... ‘here and there’.

            The old vignettes; the re-posted blog posts, are ‘put up’ in the order of their relevance to this (“It’s Been Two Years”) vignette set.  The first re-post below is, therefore, the most relevant.  Each re-post following in order below is a contribution to review or background but has diminishing consequence.  There are six re-posted vignettes in total.