In the antique store on the corner of Franklin and Main, among cut glass candy dishes and earthenware moonshine jugs, were rolling pins. Wooden, dinged, well-used. In each room they were stashed in groups of three or four, standing on end in a tin bucket, or displayed like vintage wines on an iron rack. Their handles were worn smooth from a grandmother’s floured grip rolling pie crusts, rolling cookies, pounding nuts to crack them open or crumble them to dust. The pins had history, were golden with the oils and warmth of caring hands.
Or of drudging ones. How many of these were wielded as weapons? How many mothers chased a drunken husband with one, or a naughty child, Mother’s hair wild, curls coming loose from her braid in the hot kitchen where soup bubbled and the steam made her hair sproing?
Looking at these pins, inanimate now, tucked under a harvest table in an antique shop, I saw love and work. I saw fleshy palms and red cheeks, flour poofs and golden pastry. I saw Christmas Eve with shiny copper cookie cutters shaped like stars and candy canes. I saw meat pies and bubbles through slits in the crust. I saw buttery dough with rough edges as strong feminine forearms, muscled like Popeye’s on spinach, rolled, pressed, and turned the smooth sheet. A bosom heaved, and there may have been grunting if the dough was too tough. The pin would clank on the counter, the handles would rattle. Children would sneak corners and pinch edges off, and nibble and giggle while Mom raised the wooden pin, “Don’t you touch that crust!” And she’d try to look mean and menacing, but it was Christmas and she’d break down and start giggling too.
How many stories were in these wooden pins? Were they all from Virginia? Maybe some traveled here from Appalachian Ohio, or West Virginia. Maybe even from Minnesota, like me. Would I feel their history if I touched them? If I bought one and used it – that honey one there, with handles so polished with use they fairly gleamed – would my pies and cookies be enchanted? The pins looked smooth to touch, and they were comforting in their roundness. I could cup my hand around a cylinder and run it down the pin’s length. Would it be cool or warm in this antique shop? Would it tell me a story?
A resolution that came out of my writing workshop was to take an artist’s day out every week. Last week I visited Antiques on Main in Christiansburg, VA where the rolling pins caught my eye and inspired this piece.
I highly recommend The Woman Upstairs. The work is exquisitely crafted, and as I said, Nora wasn’t particularly unlikable to me. Her intelligence and articulation might merit a re-read, even if I don’t want us to be besties. For my immediate reactions to the three books mentioned, here are my reviews on Goodreads, written as soon as I finished reading: 
‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King: I was a young teenager when I went through my Stephen King phase. My family lived in a large house on a small island off the coast of Georgia. At the time there were only a few houses on the island, and our road was dirt, not asphalt. We were a twenty minute drive from the mainland (ie a hospital), if there was an emergency. We were isolated. My room was on the second floor, and I had a white day bed with brass knobs on the corner posts. My bed was pushed up against the window, so that when I propped my head against the pillows to read, my body lay inches from the glass, my face in the center of the single four-foot pane. On the other side of the glass, a few feet from the house, swayed a cabbage palm, its moppy head at eye level with my bed.
Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell: I was once traveling and got delayed in Atlanta for several hours – maybe six or eight? I had brought with me the 32-pound hardcover of Gone With the Wind, and with so much time on my hands, rather than sit in the loud and bustling Atlanta airport, I decided to take the Marta train downtown to Centennial Olympic park. I lugged Mitchell’s tome with me and found an outdoor table at a café where I could watch kids chase bursts of water shooting up from the ground in the Centennial park fountain. As I read with my huge book splayed flat on a black iron café table, the moist Georgia heat pressed down on me. Condensation from my icy Coke trickled down the cup and pooled, then dripped onto the sidewalk below. I didn’t understand Atlanta, this city that seemed to be both South and not-South, with its messy tangle of inelegant roads and its fast pace and its strange mixture of old and new that I rarely experienced in coastal or rural Georgia. For four hours I sat with my dripping cup and I turned pages. I read the city – it’s pre-Sherman heyday, its burning, its invasion by outsiders, the fierce pride and dignity of its natives, reconstruction’s disregard of the South’s ways, of gentility, and Atlanta’s in-your-face rise from the ashes – on the pages of Mitchell’s book as in real life I breathed its air, drank its Coke, and listened to the laughter of its children, finally, through a work of fiction, understanding the history of this proud city that rose and fell, and then rose to what it is today.
Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris: (There are, um, a few F-bombs in this piece. Consider yourself warned.) Though it wasn’t the first time I read Me Talk Pretty One Day, my most memorable reading took place in Minnesota where, in the Mom circles I ran in, I never heard a single swear word (much to my dismay). I sat in the bleachers at the ice skating rink where my daughter wobbled back and forth in her lessons, the paperback in my lap, and I read “The Rooster,” a story about David’s brother, Paul, who “politely ma’ams and sirs all strangers but refers to friends and family, his father included, as either ‘bitch’ or ‘motherfucker.” Paul’s response to his father’s various lectures was, “‘Fuck it,’ or on one of his more articulate days, ‘Fuck it, motherfucker. That shit don’t mean fuck to me.”
Butterfly Mind 