Rummage sales & bake sales, are they still around? Resale shops are where I use to find things for still-life paintings. I'm am always taken back in time when doing a still-life. The Luckenburg Club, with its grand steps up to the front door and its large meeting room where tables of treasures waited for my sister and I to explore. Forgotten fire trucks with one wheel missing, cap guns, train sets, baseball gloves for a dime. Boxes of dolls and balls of every kind and size. Rummage sales were for raising money to buy a window for the church or to help needy families.
Mom and her friend were always involved in something. A cap gun I wasn't playing with I'd find on the toy table at a rummage sale. Pedaling papers, I'd return with my wagon full of things for another rummage sale. I never really knew what the money raised went for, only that it was needed somewhere. If the sale was held in the church basement the money was going for a new window in the new church.
Up the street from our house was St. George's Church. It had a grand staircase up to nothing. Their bake sales hadn't raised enough money to build anything more than the basement. I pass those stairs every day on my way to my paper route. My brother told me those stairs were the stairs to heaven. I believed him even though I only ever saw people going down the side steps. Across the church's parking lot was St. George's Hall, where our first papers were delivered. Lots of drinking and smoking went on there. I had to wait outside there while my brother took the paper inside.
Once a year St. George's had their big sale where sweet bread was made by the ladies and stuffed cabbage rolls filled the neighborhood with wonderful smells, my dad said. It was another place for me and my wagon. With a big empty pot, my brother and I would fetch our order of stuffed cabbage and sweet bread. The cabbage made our house stink I thought as a kid, that and my dad's limburger cheese. I preferred the smells from dad's candy making and mom's cake baking. Sometimes when painting I can smell those days. Those cakes mom made and all that candy dad made went to another sale to buy another window for the church. I remember grandpa and grandma standing in front of the old church just looking at it and dad saying how they had built it. I wondered how many bake sales it took to build the old church? Painting brings back moments for me and sometimes I share them with a model. In return, a model shares a moment from their childhood too.
