Oh No; You Must Care For Me

Thought I'd run up some curtains on my Kenmore sewing machine, at purchase guaranteed for 25 years. "Good Lord," I thought, when I asked for and received this as my college-graduation gift, "It's guaranteed until 2003," and by then we'd all be piloting flying saucers. "I might go hungry," I told my parents then, "but with this I'll never go naked." And I never have, although I quit sewing dresses, pants and skirts around 1999, when clothes got so cheap that fabric and notions cost more, and my sewing skills honed in junior high school rusted out. Few things are as piercingly clear as when someone eyes your outfit and says, "Did you make that?" I use this wonderfully-made, solid-state, 23-pound machine rarely and take it totally for granted.

Curtains, however, I can still run up with confidence. Thirty-six years after the purchase and the five free lessons at an urban Sears store, I chose black fleece to insulate my single-pane windows when the cold is deep--as it will be someday soon.
I set to work. Straight seams are no problem. But the needle clanked and stuck, and the thread snarled, amassed on the underside and broke, and the machine whined and resisted and I finally consulted the instruction book, a fascinating object in its own right.

My mechanical masterpiece was asking me to clean and oil it and recalibrate the thread and bobbin tensions, using the tools that came with it. Instead of a blue screen and non-response it spoke and told me in its language, now almost a lost language, that it needed TLC. Just a little. Now it runs sleekly.

Perfect Polish Pottery

In Poland on an agritour in 2012 I admired whole shops full of traditional Polish pottery, now becoming fashionable in the U.S. and retailed by places like Williams-Sonoma because it's durable, poison-free, microwavable and oven-safe, each piece hand-painted with imaginative, folky, usually abstract designs (often in cobalt blue, and yellow and green) and, for ceramics, Polish pottery is cheap. I wanted it all, but since then I've been seeking a single ideal piece to remind me of the warmth of Poland, where I was very happy, and my Polish roots. Had to be useful, authentic and adorable. Then one day this came up on eBay. A ten-ounce cup circled with folk-style rabbits. Divine.

Polish pottery is called "Boleslawiec" pottery; Boleslawiec is Poland's "ceramics city," famed for natural clay used for ceramics production since the 14th century, and much farther back according to archaeological digs. Thriving factories, destroyed during World War II, were rebuilt and individual artists have their own studios; they are allowed to sign the pieces if they make them from from start to finish. Today's typical Boleslawiec piece, with a cream ground and patterns painted in recognizable colors and styles, is a design created in the last half of the 19th century. "Boleslawiec" is in southwestern Poland (I was in southeastern Poland) and is named for Duke Boleslaw the Tall, son of Wyladyslaw the Exile.

The Carrot Box

This cheerful hand-painted wooden box was found at a Missouri antique mall some years ago and, charmed, I bought it, for, like, $12. Inside, it's just plain painted wood, no lining, no compartments, no decoration. I guessed it's for vegetables -- winter root vegetables that like darkness and room (not heaped on top of each other; onions or potatoes all heaped up will quickly go bad). I keep this "carrot box" or "carrot coffin" in the unheated laundry room that serves as my root cellar, and use it for onions. When the thermometer in there approaches freezing I save the onions from turning to acrid mush by moving the box into a heated room.

I looked up "carrot box" to see if such boxes were somehow traditional, and also learn the reason for their treasure-chest shape, but a "carrot box" today means a cardboard gift box in the shape of a long cone. Classic wooden vegetable bins hold a lot more vegetables and look nothing like this. This box, painted with 11 clean, idealized carrots, very witty, holds approximately 3 pounds of produce.