The Wish Book

When I
lived in
Naples,
Grange
had one
of the only
free
standing
interior
shops in
the States
in our 3rd
Street District.
How I loved to go into that shop and daydream. I would spend about an hour there and leave with my head full of so many new ideas. I began a notebook to stash away ideas and concepts, color and materials, places I'd like to see someday- or places I had been and couldn't wait to get back to.

Fabric swatches and paint chips nestle in its pages and they inevitably influence they way we style our home. The quilt that the Wish Book is lying on mirrors the colors in the swatches laid out within its pages. Originally chosen to cover wing chairs, the chairs ended up being reupholstered in hemp burlap but the colors were picked up in the bedroom none the less.
This page shows a very simple old fashioned pantry, not too unlike the one we have here at Hawks Run. The trouble with my pantry is that it is perched within what should be a fabulous spot for a cast iron claw foot tub. Once I find my tub, I'll pull this photo back out and reconstruct the pantry to look more like this one. It has more shallow shelves and I will be able to see things a whole lot easier.

My Wish Book is filled with a lot of gardening clippings. If I live to be one hundred I don't think I'll ever feel like I had enough time in the dirt. Each Spring is like starting life all over again- only with so much more knowledge gained the past season. I find other people's gardens so fascinating and NEVER EVER miss the garden scheme here in Lebanon when the good gardeners open their masterpieces to the public. Some are so elaborate and others are just beginning their plot. Maybe someday we'll be able to open ours...another dream.

There are a lot of pages filled with farm animals. I simply adore chickens. Our milk house is slated for a chicken house overhaul and I am so looking forward to baking with our own eggs. I talk about having chickens so often that I think I may have subliminally influenced my husband into believing it to be the most brilliant idea ever. He is now talking chickens too. The only dilemma here is that with Mr. or Mrs. Big Paws running around, the hen house will have to be built like Fort Knox.

There are a number, really a large number, of pictures depicting saltboxes in my Wish Book. I find this both intriguing and immensely satisfying that I seemed to know what I wanted even before it was shown to me. One picture in particular could be a room in our home. It is of the great room, only the owners of the house made this room their dining area. There is a long tavern table directly in front of the cooking fireplace. The windows have been greatly enlarged to twenty four over twenty fours. It is snowing outside but what with the fireplace ablaze and the well worn roof timbers, it could be our great room here at Hawk's Run. It is a room of simple beauty- really the theme of this home. Hawk's Run has such good bones that I continually find myself attempting to pare it down. On the first page of my book is a clipping from some long lost Grange catalog of yesterday...it simply says this.

"In the beginning a house resembles its owner. Time passes and with it the generations. Nothing changes even if everything evolves. One day the house changes family and the new owner can be seen to resemble the house."

There is such a fundamental truth to this statement that I still find it to be as potent as the first time that I read it. I hope it holds true for the future generations at Hawk's Run.