Bear Paw Meanderings

Often when having a brandy just before bed, I go into my mother’s bedroom which has not changed much from when she lived in it. Mother died six years ago.

It is a big room and is filled with a wonderful cannon ball bedroom set. her grandmother’s desk, a cannonball rocking chair and ottoman and many interesting pictures along with a huge gilt edged mirror.

The floor is hardwood and is covered with Oriental carpets along with one huge mountain goat rug made from seven mountain goats. Mother loved that rug as she suffered from cold feet for a long time and she could put her feet into the long strands of goat hair and be perfectly warm.

The most interesting features of the room are the pictures because several of them and the huge gild edged mirror tell very interesting stories.

When I was about eight, my little sister LouAnn came along and we needed a bigger house. So, we moved from our small house at 1015 Second Avenue to the larger Lindalow house at 12 Tenth Street.

Even when I was very young I was excited if a living room had a fireplace. The new house had a fireplace and even though it was only a gas fireplace, it was a fireplace and I was excited about it.

That first Christmas I noticed that we did not have a good large picture to go above the mantel of the fireplace, so a trudged to Woolworths which was on the corner of Second Street and Third Avenue and found a huge picture of a girl with red hair crossing a stone bridge and going to a large white house nestled in a copse of trees. I bought that picture for I suppose four bucks, maybe less but at the time it was big change for me. I wrapped it and gave it to my mother and father for Christmas so they could hang it over our fireplace.

They did just that and it looked beautiful. It is a beautiful print even to this day.

Well, one day Grandma Lucke came over and took one look at that painting and said it was the Faber house on Little Box Elder Creek and that she had a perfect place for it in her living room. So, she bought mother and father a very large gilt edged mirror to hang over the fireplace and went home with the picture which she thought until her dying day was the big old white Faber house.

Mother always wanted the picture back so one Christmas we got the brilliant idea of hiring a cousin, Vance Warwick, who loved to paint, to go out and take pictures of the Faber house and paint a picture of the whole ranch for her for Christmas in the hope she would fall in love with that and we would get our picture back.

Vance had a study hall with me in Havre High School and all he did was draw in a notebook. He loved to paint horses, Indians, cowboys and the like. I have a beautiful one of his Indian scenes in my den today.

Anyway he got the Faber ranch completed; we wrapped it up and put it under Grandma Lucke’s Christmas tree. She opened the present, and I think mother told her that was the whole Faber ranch. She took one look and pointed to our picture hanging in her huge living room and said, “This is a very nice picture but that is the Faber ranch,” pointing at the Dime Store picture.

We didn’t get the picture back until she died. Then we got both pictures back and today both hang in mother’s bedroom along with the huge gilt edged mirror.

Some good memories and lots of smiles, when I rock and sip my brandy in Mother’s bedroom.