This weekend, I put together a bookcase. Some friends had purchased it a while ago, and then decided not to use it, so they gave it to us. It sat in the garage waiting for a weekend to be put together.

As I start bringing artifacts from my mother's house, from my childhood, down to Woodbridge, we needed more shelves, so I put the bookcase together. It was fairly quick and easy to do, and it now stands next to the kitchen.

On the top of the bookcase is a large old wooden bowl. The bowl is big enough to wash a baby in. At the bottom of the bookcase is an old pressure cooker. When I was a kid, we lived on a small farm. In the spring, my brothers, sister and I would join our parents in planting rows and rows of corn. When summer rolled around we would pick bags of corn, which we would sit around outside shucking. We would carry in trays of fresh picked, fresh shucked corn, which my mother would cook in the pressure cooker. You could cook a lot of corn quickly in a pressure cooker.

When the corn was done, my mother would slice the kernels off of the ears of corn in the large old wooden bowl, and then we would spoon it into pint sized freezer containers and fill up the freezer in the basement with frozen homegrown corn.

These old implements from my childhood of putting food by for the winter now serve as decorations, ready to be put into back service when the time calls. Yet unlike the antiques that I've seen in so many houses, these are artifacts of my childhood, ladened with stories and memories.