KEEPSAKE CHRONICLES
Romancing the Past
Great Grandpa's
Handiwork
Around 1900, Amici's hard work and labor built the family house in Brooklyn, and afterwards slapped together a rustic cabinet with some leftover pine boards. His handiwork sat on the back porch, like a mudroom, for over 100 years.
Cathy's mom had passed away and she and her five brothers had sold the family home that had nurtured five generations. Cathy wanted to take this cabinet with her down to Delaware as a keepsake. But first she wanted to get it refinished. A girlfriend of hers from Manhattan had referred our studio to her and she had the cabinet brought out from Brooklyn. In discussing the work with her, I saw an opportunity to do something unique.
When asked why she wanted to keep this rustic cabinet, Cathy related to me that she had many memories of gardening in the backyard as a girl with her grandmother and mother. This cabinet held the gardening tools, seeds, bulbs – as a matter of fact, everything involved in the gardening ended up on and in this cabinet.
I asked Cathy to get me some soil from the garden. She did me one better. She got me two cups of dirt: one from the garden and one from her mom's cemetery plot. We percolated the soil like coffee beans and used the minerals to create a special stain which we applied to a limited portion of the piece. There was also a stone in the cup with the dirt from her mom's grave that we embedded on the backside of the top molding as a touchstone.
When we removed the backboards in order to do some repairs to the cabinet, we were careful to save the original nails. We didn't want to sand away the character of the old iron nails, so we wire-brushed them, painted them and used them to reattach the backboards.
Upon seeing the completed piece, Cathy's response was to give her spiffed-up old friend a kiss. I think we nailed this memory down right. (Pun intended, though perhaps not excused.)
