Weekend Reading 05.29
Putting a frame around it. Plus, links for your weekend.
Hi friends. For many years my refrigerator was a bulletin board. I’m sure you’re familiar: pictures, birthday invitations, school calendars, and the like.
Then the first stainless steel fridges came out and magnets wouldn’t stick to them. Moms everywhere were flummoxed! Where was our life supposed to go?
The manufacturers must have heard the complaints because soon they began advertising stainless steel fridges that would hold a magnet. But by then I liked my clean fridge.
Enter a bulletin board from Etsy. It was covered in burlap with bronze colored studs going around the edge. I hung it in the kitchen and it held all the aforementioned items until every year at Christmas time, when I cleared the whole thing off and used it to display the Christmas cards we received. When the season was over I started fresh.
That’s still my routine, but eventually I began craving a different bulletin board. Something longer, to fit the space better. Something with a pretty frame. And I was definitely over the burlap.
I knew my best bet was to find something already framed that I could turn into a bulletin board. It would have been simpler to have a bulletin board framed but I wanted something older, with a little bit of history, and besides, I like the hunt.
I thought I had a winner last fall in the form of a Facebook Marketplace listing for two pictures in gold frames with what seemed like the right dimensions. I only needed one, of course, but they were being sold as a pair and I was able to negotiate a price low enough to make it worth the 45 minute drive north to Leavenworth.
The agreed upon meeting time was a rainy Friday evening (obviously) and when I arrived at the destination I parked and found myself looking up a tall set of stairs that ended at an old, stone house.
The situation had all the ingredients of a horror film: a dark street, at Halloween, with a famed federal prison a few miles away, and did I mention that it was raining?
I wasn’t nervous for some reason. Maybe because the Halloween decorations in the yard were more cute than scary? Maybe because I had texted Tom the address before I left? Indeed a nice, young woman answered the door, I handed her cash, she handed me the pictures, and I carried them back down the dark, wet steps without falling or getting murdered.
Alas, once the pictures were home I discovered that the measurements in the Facebook listing were wrong and they weren’t going to work. So I took them to a consignment store and continued the search.
Then last week - seven months almost to the day after the drive to Leavenworth - I found myself in the same consignment store and came upon a frame that was nearly* perfect. I studied it, took pictures of it, and had decided I would go home and think about it when suddenly I had a change of heart and decided to get it.
I was taking it off the wall when an employee offered to help and, as he carried it to the register, he told me another person had been looking at it the day before. They had even taken pictures of it. Were we related, he asked? Had they sent me in?
No, I told him, no relation, and I sent a silent thanks to the universe for nudging me to buy it then. (I tend to thank the universe in these situations because surely God’s too busy for bulletin board sourcing.)
I got the frame home and began searching for cork board that could be ordered in custom sizes when I ran across rolls of thin cork with adhesive backing and it occurred to me that I could try sticking the cork to the picture/foam core that was already in the frame, the closest thing to a DIY that I’m willing and able to do.
The width of the cork was perfect and the length only a few inches longer than I needed so after months (years?) of searching, the whole thing was done in 24 hours. I think the universe had decided that the whole saga had gone on long enough.
All that was left was to transfer of items from the old bulletin board to the new. The family pictures. The invitations. A pic of a Roman street scene that we bought on a trip and another of a mother and child that fell out of a Christmas card one year.
There are lots of pics of Madeline of course, and we’ve entered the delightful season of her artwork.
There’s also a tiny pic of my Tom with the golfer Tom Watson, taken after a golf tournament, and cut out of a page in Kansas City’s society magazine, the one and only time our family will be represented in said magazine.
Finally, in an upper corner, I have started an accidental pin collection: a pin given to families at Grant’s college graduation, a NY Public Library logo pin, a couple of campaign pins found in Tom’s parents’ things, a funny pin given to us as part of a Christmas gift, and a Mother’s Day pin from one of the kids declaring me “one amazing mom.”
All of these are the kinds of things that usually end up in a drawer or box, and these probably will someday too, because what else are you to do with them? Put a frame around them, it turns out, at least for a while. A frame that turns a bunch or random, everyday things into something more like art, right there in the kitchen.
Here’s what I saved to share with you this week…
There’s so much to love about this renovated NY farmhouse.
What it’s like to live in an architectural icon. Eleanor Cording-Booth’s fascinating essay with pics had me googling Brutalist architecture, looking up Google street views, and watching Harry Styles music videos.
What a great idea for a playlist: James Bond themes and title songs.
Grammy-winning R&B singer Jill Scott gets emotional telling NPR about her dream of having a house on Spring Garden in Philadelphia.
Speaking of Philly, you can see some amazing things in the Free Library’s Rare Book Department.
Have a good weekend!
Julie
Love this frame idea!