My family is pretty small but I do have some relatives in California. After my mother had graduated from college in Iowa, the rest of the family moved to California. My father had family in Iowa and they both had jobs so they stayed in cold, icy, humid Iowa. Hmmm. I wonder what it would have been like growing up as a California girl. No, I’m happy that I was raised in Iowa. But, back to the rest of the family. My Aunt Marilyn went to college in San Francisco and met Bob, a Navy officer and they stayed in this area for most of their lives, with stints in China and on the east coast. My Uncle Chuck also stayed in California raising a family and marrying Betty who we will be visiting in March.
And, that’s one of the reasons why we like RV’ing in California and this month we are in San Diego and visiting Marilyn. One of her hobbies is her Department 56 villages. She must have had hundreds of different buildings along with all the accompanying people, carriages, wagons, street lights, trees and other pieces. She puts up her villages in October and November and takes them down in late January and Feb. She puts up so many that it takes a month or so to assemble and to take down. She loves to see the villages lit up at night but doesn’t like putting them up nor taking them down. And, with good reason: it is futsy and takes loads of time.
And, that’s where we come in - we get to help her take it all down. It gets the job done and we get to spend some quality time with Marilyn. We could visit for a few hours or we could go out to eat but this is so much more productive, leisurely and friendly. But, I’ll admit, Marilyn thinks that we are anything but leisurely.
She has villages in the kitchen (which used to be a 3-tier cantilevered plan), the ‘powder’ room, the 4-season porch with at least 12 or so buildings in each of these. She also has buildings in the bedrooms the living room, the sewing table, the cabinet and maybe a few other places. In short - the house is filled, though, we have noticed that she is putting up fewer and fewer as time goes on. Whew.
Our first time helping her and Fred taking down the villages was 3 years ago and I really had to work to convince her that we should help them. She was concerned that we might not be careful enough with her pieces. Anytime you have a collection like this you worry about others handling them. But, we must have proved careful enough because she let us help her the next year too. Last year we sprinted out of California back to Iowa too early to help her but this year it took no time at all to convince her that we should help.
She first puts a shaped board on the counter then builds a raised platform using foam board to go over this so that she can string the electrical cords below the villages. Each building has a light in it and she usually strings street lights throughout the villages. This year she did not have enough time for the street lights and she left them off. But the lights for the buildings are still there.
Here’s the kitchen before we struck.
Here is the ‘powder’ room.
The plan is to remove the carriages and wagons first since they are the biggest accessories. She pulls out all the huge tote bags in which she stores the boxes for all these, Gary and I grab a box from the bag and go looking for the piece or pieces that belongs in that box. After we have the wagons, carriages and the large pieces packed, we go after the smaller pieces, the people. Most boxes have 3 or 4 little people in it and we could find one pieces in the kitchen, one in the living room, one in the master bedroom and one in the study. Anywhere. We get a lot of step work in doing this.
Fred used to do all the packing but is not able to move much this year (see Friday for his story) and so Marilyn set up for this job this year. Since both Gary and I were searching, Marilyn fell a bit behind so we both began to pack the boxes we had found. Worked pretty fast that way. We had all the people and carriages and wagons and some of the buildings done by 5:00 when we stopped for dinner. Nice chat over dinner and then we came back to the RV, to gear up for Tuesday.
Tuesday we arrived promptly at 10:00 and began where we had left off. We got the building all packed, all the greenery around the village packed and finally got to put away the foam board platforms.
Here’s the powder room now.
and the kitchen
Gary stowed the greenery and the foam boards up in the rafters of the garage, we moved all the building boxes out into the garage and stacked them by which room of the house she had set them up in,
and all of the tote bags with the small accessories.
but still left a mess in the house.
But it was 5:00 and time to quit. Marilyn thought that she could put all the boxes away herself since she knew where she wanted to put each. And, she could take her time doing this. Most of the work was done. And, thus, our part in deconstructing the villages is done.
No comments:
Post a Comment