Bears Everywhere

I have instituted a version of Swedish Death Cleaning because I am getting tired of being overrun by stuff. Also, we have people coming to visit, which always motivates me to do some thorough deep cleaning. The husband brought back a beautiful walnut roll-top desk from his dad’s house last fall and we wanted to put it in the living room so it didn’t have to spend another winter in the rental house garage. In order for that to happen, though, several other pieces of furniture had to get moved, in a specific order. I couldn’t move them without help or this already would have been accomplished.

I made a list of what needed to happen, in what order, and we tackled it yesterday morning. We started by moving a vintage sewing machine in a cabinet from our bedroom to the garage. Some of my machines need to get released back into the wild (taken to the thrift store or sold to people) and this was one of them. Many years ago, my father made me a map chest that holds all of my knitting needles. It needed to be moved from the corner of the living room up to the spot in the bedroom previously occupied by the sewing machine. We took all of the drawers out—I have to go through them now and organize my needles—and the husband moved the map chest upstairs. Also in that corner was a double-wide rocking chair. I don’t want to sell it because I used to sit there with the girls and read to them when they were little. That rocking chair went over to the rental house to one of the bedrooms.

Once the corner was empty, I mopped the floor and touched up a few holes in the walls where pictures had hung. The husband went over to the rental house garage and began loading the pieces of the desk into the truck. I helped him with the pieces that needed two people to move. A few areas on the desk needed re-gluing, so he set up some sawhorses on the porch to make those repairs. In the meantime, I strained the ham stock that had been simmering in the roaster and put it in the fridge to cool so I could scrape the fat off the top before I can it.

After lunch, I brought in another wagon load of tomatoes to ripen inside and put ripe ones in the freezer. While he was waiting for glue to dry, we got the apples and pears off all the trees except the Golden Delicious. Those apples need another week or two yet. The last task on my list was to clean up some nightstands. They had been in Sunnie’s house and given to Robin when Sunnie sold her house last year. Robin offered them to me. I have been looking for nightstands for the rental house all summer with no luck. I picked them up from Robin on Friday. They need to be stripped and refinished at some point, but I don’t have time for that right now. Instead, I washed them down with some Murphy’s oil soap, went over them with fine steel wool, then gave them a coat of Howard’s Restore-a-Finish. That stuff is pretty amazing. It doesn’t completely refinish the wood, but it brightens the existing finish and fills in any spots where the finish has worn away. I’ve used it before on sewing machine cabinets. The nightstands look fine for now and I’ll put them in the rental house bedroom today. (Thank you, Sunnie and Robin. 😊)

The husband and I reassembled the desk in the late afternoon. It looks very nice in the corner of the living room. We need to find a chair to go with it.

Our reward to ourselves for all that work was dinner in town and a trip to Home Depot. On the way to town, I spotted a black bear in a meadow, so we stopped to watch it for a minute:

I don’t know if this is the same bear I saw a few weeks ago or the same bear that wandered through our woods. (They don’t wear name tags, unfortunately.) Someone in our neighborhood had reported a black bear with a cub in that same area, but I didn’t see any cubs with this one.

A front is coming through today with cooler temps and more rain today, but after that, we are supposed to get about a week of really nice weather. I am hoping the rest of the tomatoes will ripen because there are a lot of them out there.

And I suspect we may have some peeps. I have had several broody hens sitting on eggs for the last couple of weeks. One of the formerly-broody Black Australorps was parked in the middle of the chicken coop, on the floor, when I went in there yesterday. She refused to move. That usually means a hen has chicks under her, although I didn’t hear any cheeping. I checked again when we got home from town and she was still there. Perhaps I’ll see some chicks this morning.

I leave you with a photo of the huckleberry mud pie we had for dessert last night. The bears aren’t the only ones who love huckleberries: