Sorry that my last post about Cyndi’s birthday present was short on content, but I was pressed for time and really just wanted it up. Now that I have a little more free time on my hands I’ll give a little background on the matter.
When Jimmy was alive he gave us some cedar boards, the same cedar boards, boards that were originally meant to be a top for a stationary porch swing for Don’s house, but sadly were the wrong size for that in the end. The boards sat at his rental property for a few years half covered by a tarp. When he gave them to us, we went (with him) to pick them up. They all fit nicely in the back of his little pickup truck. We planned on using them to line our closet in the house on the hill, but were not yet ready for them, and rather then having them sit out in the weather any longer he offered to have them stored in his workshop. Sadly he died long before the closet was ready to be put up, and some of the boards were rightly used to build a coffin box for his ashes (which Don built). The rest of the boards were left in the workshop because we were still not ready for them.
Then all that stuff happened with Hazel and the house had to be taken down. On one of the trips we made we used the key they gave us to the workshop and we got the boards along with some of our other belongings that we had stored there. On the last day of the move we got a call from the Sheriffs department asking about $3,000.00 worth of cedar boards that were stolen (that’s right, $3,000!?!?!) and we told the officer that there were only about 20 boards and that they were given to us. Later in court we had to prove that the boards belonged to us and that there were never enough to equal three thousand dollars worth of them. Our best witnesses were Hazel and her friends who were not only clueless as to how many boards there were, but were comical in their ignorance of them. In the end they more or less admitted that there were only maybe two dozen boards, which in no way could ever equal $3,000…
Through all of that Cyndi mentioned that she would love to have a Hope Chest type box to keep blankets in that she could then someday pass down to Lakota. We had the boards in the broken out building on the farm for the longest time, and finally got them over to Don’s barn so they could be dried properly. I had every intention to have the box built by Christmas for Cyndi, but there was simply too much to do and not enough time to do all of it in, so they sat in the barn drying… The box was not mentioned, and I am sure that Cyndi was rather sad that one of her only Christmas Wishes never came true.
In late February I remembered about the box and was going to call Don to see if he could help me get it done, but he had to go away for a week. So we waited till he got back, and started the box…the information of what happened after that is pretty much explained in the other post about it. I just wanted to give a bit of the background info. So there it is, the history of the box, and here is a final image…
The finished Cedar Chest...
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