I'm Such a Romantic Guy

There is a family story that gets repeated occasionally. It's a true story from the early days of our marriage. Like many young marrieds we didn't have much money, we were in our house with young children and we had a charge account at the local hardware store. It happened to be our anniversary and I was in the Exeter Mercantile looking for something as a gift. Now realize this store has been around for almost 100 years and is a full service hardware store. You can get your fine china, olive oil from Italy, ammunition, tools, nuts, bolts, animal feed and tractor parts while the tractor is being serviced.

I'm overly practical at times and this was one of those instances. I grabbed a Eastwing steel handled hammer. Perfect. Maureen could have her own hammer and if it was left outside the handle wouldn't wear out. Now, I did realize this wasn't a totally great idea; I knew I needed something else a tad bit less utilitarian to add to the gift. I was walking through the cookware section when I saw the perfect compliment, pizza scissors. Instead of cutting our wonderful homemade pizza with a knife or a wheel; one could snip, snip, snip the pizza and then lift it to your plate with the wide bodied scissors.

 Fast forward to this past weekend and another of our anniversaries. No more hammers and pizza tools this time. This year was an example of how we have settled in with each other like sliding on a pair of comfortable jeans. This year a trip to almost the coast; just the two of us spending time together and buying wine barrels. Empty wine barrels.

Yes, Mr. Romantic struck again, though this time we chose the gift together. We are in the process of redoing our yard again and wanted to add more fruit trees. This year has been one of changes and we expect more in the future. We wanted trees that could be moved if needed and barrels seems the logical way to grow the trees.

We looked locally for wine barrels and the prices seemed steep. BIL John found a source in Paso Robles at a great price for used whole barrels. We added the cost of gas and the barrels still were cheaper than buying here. In fact we could afford a few bottles of wine and the barrels were still less expensive. So we were off on another adventure. We tasted a few wines, and in a bit of "it's a small world" the woman that served us at the tasting room was a college roommate of a classmate. We loaded the five barrels in the back of the pickup and headed home.

Yesterday a few of the barrels were cut in half and we planted the first trees of our wine barrel orchard. Once the trees produce, we expect to be eating fruit from them for quite awhile. Just like the hammer and scissors are still producing years later.