August 2020
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It's called a transplant shovel, and it's manufactured by Sneeboer, a company located in Holland. If you want to buy a garden tool from Sneeboer, you get on the virtual line, and then wait until your number comes up. Worth waiting. I have a weakness for well-made garden tools. This one might be the best…
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We watched the first season of Yellowstone (eight episodes, or about 350 full minutes, all told). It's not our usual fare, but because a close relative, an accomplished actor, has just contracted to appear in Season Four, it seemed important to investigate. Yellowstone sustained our interest but in my opinion it's mighty derivative. I think…
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It's a place setting, sterling silver, "Diamond" pattern," manufactured by Reed & Barton of Taunton, Massachusetts in 1958. I own nine such place settings as well as a few miscellaneous serving pieces. I like them now but I didn't back then. In the 1950s, dear grandchildren, it was considered ideal for respectable middle-class women to…
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I It's not a very good picture, but then, I'm not a very good photographer. It's a Tibetan rug, monochromatic and undramatic, but in my opinion, extremely handsome. Sometime during the 1970s, a store selling Tibetan antiques opened in Boulder, stayed with us for a very few months, and then closed. I fell deeply and…
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When we moved to Manhattan, in 1965, for a first real job, we had hardly a stick of furniture. We thought we needed, in addition to a bed and a kitchen table, a bench for an entrance hall. Wandering around Greenwich Village (Althea was very big with child), we stumbled into an antique store, one…
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This unassuming object played, and continues to play, a consequential part in my life. It's a plain brass bell, unadorned, maker and age unknown. It's not musical but when properly agitated it can make a helluva loud noise. It was given to my mother in 1947 by her mother, my grandmother, Sonia Green. How my…
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For me, the summer and autumn of 2010 was a bad period, even though it led to the only moment of prayer and reverence in my entire life. Readers and fans of this blague know that I have more than once reported that I was born into a purely, even aggressively, atheistic family and that…
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This sugar and creamer are the only objecs I own that deserve to be in a museum. They were made by Bauhaus potter Marguerite Wildenhain at her Pond Farm studio in Guerneville, California, near the Russian River, sometime around 1972. I don't think that the picture captures the strength or beauty of the workmanship. They're…
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Althea bought this rug at an auction in Warren, New Hampshire in 1968 — and it is the first rug we ever owned — the first of many. I was startled when she bid on it because we were in the market for crockery and glasses and chairs, not for decorative objects, but she saw…
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This appealing pitcher and vase set were thrown by Ben Owen II, a potter who lived and worked in Seagrove, North Carolina. In September of 1966, we visited Tom and Margaret in Chapel Hill and they took us on an excursion to Seagrove, where we bought these fine works of art. Ben Owen was very…