Saturday mornings in Springtime always stir up a restlessness in my husband. It's too much to expect him to stay in on beautiful, sunny, cool mornings... and who can blame him? Sometimes he's out in the yard, before breakfast, picking up sticks and pine cones, watering plants, and puttering about. Other Saturday mornings he slyly offers to "run out" and pick up a treat for breakfast. Most of the time treasure hunting is what he has in mind; no plan of action, really, just a desire to drive around town, classifieds in hand, looking for signs, and hoping to lay eyes on a really great sale.
When we were newly married, living, nearly, in downtown Columbus we'd be up early with the birds on sunny Saturday mornings in Spring. Springtime in Ohio is so... green! After the long... gray... winter one just wants to be out, to be warm, to feel alive. We would choke down quick bowls of cereal and head out, no plan needed, just out to see what we could find.
Most Saturdays we would start in Grandview, our own neighborhood. The professor might duck into Stauf's for a cup of coffee, sometimes we'd pay a visit to the Donut Kitchen. Then we'd be off, driving up and down Fifth Avenue looking for signs. We'd stop in at yard sales, garage sales, tag sales and estate sales. From Grandview we'd move on to Upper Arlington and then over to Clintonville for more sales and our favorite junk stores. Eventually we might make it down to German Village. I'll never forget the the Danish modern, mahogany arm chair that we found at a church sale there. We should have bought it for $50; at the time $50 was more than we could pay.
Our Saturday morning ramblings would almost always end at Wildwood's junk store on High Street near campus. Old Wildwood liked to sleep late and often wouldn't open his doors until eleven or twelve on Saturday mornings. In there we would weave amongst the dusty junk, which was piled high, in search of treasures. Wildwood was sharp, he knew his stuff, usually not a chance of a steal deal, but he was fair and didn't overprice... and he liked to make trades.
Most Saturdays our treasure seeking didn't produce more than happy times, house dreaming, and a first rate mod education (although we did pick up a few cool artifacts along the way), but, best of all, the memories are sweet. So sweet, that even now, I sense a restlessness in the professor to recapture those simple Saturday mornings in Spring.
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