Lavender Path Antiques and Books

09/27/2026

My antique hand crafted Dutch wind mill is spinning away with the Nor’easter arriving , it will be a blur spinning as the wind picks up as the day goes on and the storm gains strength. Wind is starting to howl now.

09/24/2026

Ah, yes. I felt this quote to my core. I found solace in books as a child, and that same feeling followed me into adulthood.

09/21/2026

Every mountain child grew up under a standing rule about one piece of furniture in that kitchen, and it was absolute. You did not open that door. 🥧

Get close to those panels. Somebody sat down with a sheet of tin, a hammer and a nail and punched hundreds of holes into a star inside a circle inside a border of diamonds, by hand, for a kitchen cabinet.

The pie safe was solving a problem that is easy to forget existed. There was no refrigeration. Cooked food had to sit out, but it could not sit out in the open, because flies in a mountain summer were a serious matter and a mouse was worse. Put the food in a sealed box and it sweats, molds and sours inside a day. So the safe had to do two contradictory things at once. Keep vermin out, and let air move through.

That is what the punched tin is. It is a screen, made before window screen was available or affordable, and the burrs are deliberately punched from the inside out so the sharp edges face the world and a mouse gets nothing to work with.

Now look at it again as something other than a tool. The pattern is not required. Holes in a plain grid would have cooled a pie exactly as well. Somebody chose a star. Somebody's granddad worked out a design that was his, and in a good many counties you can still identify the maker by it, because a man who was good at this made safes for everybody on that creek.

That was frequently the only decorated object in a working kitchen. Not the parlor. The kitchen, where the woman of the house spent her life.

And behind those doors was the leftover cornbread, the biscuits from breakfast, the pie for Sunday and the butter dish, which is exactly why children were not allowed in it.

Somebody in these mountains made something beautiful out of a sheet of scrap tin because the alternative was plain, and they decided against plain. ✨

09/20/2026

Every old house had a doorway that wore a quilt all winter, nailed up on the inside where the cold came in worst.

Wealthier Victorian houses hung a heavy curtain called a portiere across a doorway for the same reason, to close off a room and heat only the parts of a big drafty house worth heating. A farmhouse did it with what it already owned: a heavy quilt, tacked up over the north door or the bottom of the stairs the week the first hard frost came, taken down again in April.

Up to thirty percent of a house's heat can slip out around its windows and doors, more than most people guess for something you can fix with a needle and a nail. The quilt on the door was solving that problem before anyone had a name for it.

Somebody's grandmother still remembers exactly which quilt it was, and exactly which door.

09/20/2026