I have always wanted a Hoosier hutch...... I still don't have one but I am happy, happy, happy.

I remember as a little girl living in a large old farm house just after my grandparents were killed in a car wreck.  We had lived in their house but it was too hard for my mom to stay there so after giving in a try for a number of months we moved to a 50 acre farm.  It had a large farm house on it that we lived in until my dad made a basement that we moved into.  They sold part of the farm and the farm house my mom's cousins cousin.  We were told as small children she was a 5th cousin for what reason I don't know, I just call her Auntie now, but I digress.  We lived in that farmhouse when my great grandmother came to visit,  she was out of sorts for the most part while she visited, she had lost her daughter and son in law, may grandparents, as they were traveling to her husbands, may great grandfathers funeral.  I only had occasion to see her a few times in my life and none of them do I recall as being pleasant.  She would come to see us by bus after the funeral from Arkansas until she was about 87 years old.  She got an eye disease and went mostly blind so after that she could no longer come, she lived to 94.  My siblings tell of a summer that she came and was pleasant but I wasn't there, but again I have digressed.  I loved the Hoosier cupboards that were in that old farm house.  My mom let them go with the house but I so dearly loved them that I have coveted one all of my life time.  I have never as an adult been able to afford a nice one.  I did once have an really small one that was made close to the end of the great Hoosier era but it was not the same.

I got the idea that Poppie could make me one last spring, much to Poppie dismay.  Poppie, God love him is a master of a lot of things but as a wood worker he usually cuts corners and the end result is not always of great quality but he tries.  He really drug his feet on my hutch for the longest time.  I finally came across the bottom of one at the local Methodist Church rummage sale.  I was ecstatic and Poppie was a little more excited with the prospect of the bottom being finished.  It was in rough shape so we started to take it apart to repair it before we were to make the top of the hutch.  Low and behold it was not a hutch bottom, some one from shear necessity had taken a Hoosier desk and made it into a hutch bottom.  We rescued the desk and left it in tack, and it now resides in my pantry as a sewing table, along side of a matching small Hoosier cabinet but alas not Hoosier hutch bottom.  We were back to square one.  I finally talked Poppie into restructuring a a pine baking cart into a bottom.  It really did turn out alright in the end. That done Poppie went on strike for about 6 months before I talked him into making the hutch top.  I had collected over the years a sugar bin, a flour bin, an accompanying bread box.  I had a spice wrack from the forties and a spinner one that is new but could be repurposed as the accompaniments.  He finally made it and this is how it turned out.  I is beautiful, I must say, if I do say so myself.  He did take special care with it and it turned out to be the nicest piece of furniture he ever made me, it was worth the wait.  I still don't have a Hoosier but I do have the one and only Poppie made next best thing to it.  God bless you and your day.....tomorrow.