Thursday June 23, 2022 “Wonder”

 An Antique Like Us

    The other day we had a couple young family members come up from The Cities. They were in their mid-twenties. The young man had wanted to come up here for a number of years, but for reasons that life sometimes throws at a person, he could never arrange his schedule of work and play to make it, until recently; he even brought a friend who he thought would like it too; and it seems she did.

    Kindly soft-spoken people, they accepted our modest ‘deer shack’ (as my wife Jackie almost lovingly refers to it), as a pleasing place to stay a couple nights over Memorial Day Weekend. Granted it isn’t lake shore property; they missed that high water event by a couple weeks; nor is it a campsite nestled against stately mountains. Basically, it’s just a destination in the middle of nowhere: a homey place with clean comfortable beds, privacy (two bathrooms), quiet, and beauty with Mikinaak Creek flowing by, and where, if a person is patient and observant, wild northern Minnesota animals can frequently be seen and sometimes heard from the windows.

    The house was built in 1938; moved in here in 1992 from 75-miles away. Since then, it’s sort of settled into the scenery to the point where the animals all accept it as being here forever. An occasional hawk uses its high ridge line as a convenient perch as it watches for prey; bald eagles own first rights to the big oak branches across the creek; the ravens have seconds, but sometimes a crow sneaks in when nobody is looking.

    Jackie has a bunch of old photographs of everyone in the family many in group images when we’ve gotten together at resorts or restaurants until Covid impacted us, as it had family gatherings across the country. I can look through her collage here and see how people have matured and changed in appearance, especially ourselves; it’s hard to believe I’ve got even better looking ... Who knew?

    But of all the wonder the kids could’ve experienced visiting us that weekend, it was the discovery of this plastic-handled ‘antique’ nestled atop some envelopes on the counter of the china cabinet that created so much interest to the young man, a computer technician at an international food processing plant, who after asking permission to pick it up to examine it more closely, asked Jackie what it was.

“It’s a lint brush,” she said.

    “It’s a lint brush,” she said, as though she thought he was joking with her.
    “A what?” he asked, smiling at her, thinking she was joking with him.
 

    “A lint brush ...” she replied, letting the words sink in, waiting for his punch line.
    “A lint ... brush, “ he answered, repeating it just as slowly. “What does it do?”

    “Removes lint,” Jackie said, trying not to laugh for she started to see he was serious.   

   "This is a lint remover?" He said skeptically, looking about the room to see if others were laughing, then added with conviction, "This isn't a lint remover!"

    It was about this time his friend interjected, "He's thinking about a lint 'roller'."

    Ohhhh!