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I just love my ‘old things’ and it’s a good thing because my husband likes to make my old things last forever He is a ‘fixer’. He had rather fiddle with something that is broken or just not working well than to eat cake. He is a good fixer and can make do with little or nothing to work with. We save things, bits and pieces mostly and when I mention that I may throw this or that away, the answer is always NO, I might need that one day.

I can just imagine the big sighs and laughter when our three kids go through our stuff when we no longer have need or use for all of it. Only one of our kids keeps stuff around for future use and that is our son. He is a fixer like his dad and they sort of have a running ‘Have you seen what I just fixed’, thing going. Just lately Brad was telling me about a tire pump he fixed. The reason he had to fix it was because after he attached it to his low tire, filled the tire and then he went to tend to something else and forgot it was still attached and got in the car and drove off UNTIL he heard thump, thump, whack, whack! For a second he thought what in the world was that and then realization set in and he knew.

He was so mad at himself that he took the thing loose and threw it into the woods. It was a $30 pump he had just bought but he didn’t care he just didn’t want to be reminded of what he’d done. A few days later he came upon it again and decided he might be able to fix it. He scrounged around and found enough stuff to fix it and then when he was out here the other day, he brought it for his dad to see. It works again and he had spent not a dime in making it useable; just some old bits and pieces and a good amount of ingenuity.

I still have the original aluminum colander that I bought at Morgan and Lindsey’s Five and Dime 56 years ago. It has strained innumerable things for more than half a century but eventually one of its three legs fell off and I was about to send it to junk heap until Pat saw it and fixed it! He has a welding outfit and heated up the thing and he fashioned a third leg and voila, it was good as new, if a bit crooked after all these years.

I have a lot of kitchen tools that were made in the USA! I have some knives I have had so long that the steel is worn from having been sharpened so many times. I have grandmother’s tube pan and it must be 75 years old and still does the job. She made me and my mother an angel food cake every year for our birthdays with that same tube pan. Did I mention that she filled up the hole in the cake with her famous and wonderful seven minute icing? Nothing ever sticks in it and it is of course not Teflon coated. I will probably die of Teflon build up in my colon as I am not good at taking care of Teflon cookware and I have hacked off (but don’t see it) so much of the coating as to wonder, did I eat that?? Teflon build up is kind of like the 6 pounds of lipstick that women ingest over time, you don’t taste but you sure do know it went down the little red road.

Pat and I checked though my kitchen tools drawer and found several interesting and very old and still useable items. I do have some of my Revere Ware pots and pans but I gave up on the Revere Ware skillets two decades ago in favor of my grandmothers black cast iron skillet which is my most used item, it never fails me and nothing sticks.

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Since I was in the antiques business for so many years I have a great many really old kitchen utensils that I use every day. I have a potato masher (a good heavy one) some knives and a knife sharpener and even an old fashioned grater that I have grated my knuckles on pretty often.

They just don’t make kitchen items that will last for decades and decades any more and they cost so much more. I have one old large crock bowl that I make my microwave pecan pralines in. One time I grabbed a different bowl to make the pralines and I guess because the weight or density of the bowl was different I had to re-cook those pralines three times before I had a batch that would harden.

I have a round wooden bread board that my grandmother used for ages before me and I always use it to roll a pie crust because it is just the size the crust should be.

It’s about time for me to look at some new pots and pans as some of the cheaper stuff is looking like it should be in the garbage rather than on the stove.

My mother kept everything and so I have inherited a lot of her things too. I have the scissors that I cut out the first garment I ever made with and they are still as sharp as a tack because she would never let me use them to cut paper. I have her sewing basket too and it has thread in every color of the rainbow and a good thing because in my younger days I wasn’t very good at sewing, and I only had two colors of thread. I used the white thread on the light colored things and black on everything else.

Speaking of my mother, I think she must have never even lost a bobby pin. She was always fussing that I needed to buy more bobby pins. She told me once that if I’d clean out the drawer in my dressing table, I might not have to buy any. Do some of you remember those dressing tables that were kidney shaped and had a skirt tacked around it and when you opened the ‘arms’ there was your makeup drawer?

I never said the good old days were the best ones, but some of the things that I have from the old days are certainly better than the new ones and I just love these favorite old things.