A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. ~Lao Tzu
As I work for a Catholic college, I did not have a proper spring break this year. Easter is so late that we take a “spring pause,” but then have an Easter break. My spring pause was for 2 days last week. My parents came for a visit in search of spring in the Heartland.
They didn’t find it.
Don’t get me wrong, a few bulbs have burst forth from the permafrost ground, hinting at crocus, tulips and daffodils, and there was quite the thunderstorm all of which suggested spring might arrive at some point in the future.
In preparation for this event called spring, my dad, bundled in a long sleeve T-shirt, fleece, boots and gloves worked, huddled in the garage, on a huge table that now sits bright and shiny in my gray, frosty backyard.
Mom and I shopped.
Both parties were working in an effort to create a space in my backyard that will invite friends, neighbors and passersby to partake in spring Southern hospitality in the heart of Dubuque, Iowa.
In an effort to stave off cabin fever and cold weather blues in my first winter in Iowa, my mind has been reeling with plans for a shabby chic garden, with bright blues and greens sparkling amid mint juleps and shrimp boils for my Midwestern friends.
My vision includes a mixed glut of folding bistro chairs clattered around the Jerry Hinton original table. Chairs full of character I intended to buy across Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois on the cheap in antique shops where perhaps Charles Ingalls-designed chairs might reside (remember when he worked in Burr Oak, just an hour and a half north of Dubuque?)
Turns out there are no antique stores in Dubuque despite lots of rumor and supplication.
I had been given vague directions from just about everybody about a warehouse which housed architectural salvage pieces “down there on Jackson, near where the feed store used to be” or the antique store “near Kmart where Judy’s cousin works.”
After an hour of driving up and down Jackson looking for any sign of the architecture salvage store we gave up and went in search of Judy’s cousin’s antique store thinking she might know of said architecture salvage store.
Judy’s cousin, Joan, who actually works in a consignment store where the many purses and side tables were circa 1992, seemed to recall a man named Ken who used to have a store on Jackson, but was now in Galena, Illinois.
Excited about HAVING to go to Galena—about a 20-minute trip—Mom and I head across the Mississippi River to the historic community, which exclaims it is the oldest city in Illinois. Another claim to fame is they turned down the offer to be a railroad hub, which a little town 2 hours north, called Chicago, quickly volunteered to accept within in its city limits.
Mom and I had no problem finding a fantastic lunch that used all local products from the beef and the barbeque sauce we had for an entrée to the popcorn that was available as an appetizer.
After lunch we wandered up and down Main Street, finding a few antique specialty stores—one specializing in toys another in pretty pink linens, vintage clothing and hats (stacks and stacks of hats)—but no architecture salvage shop.
A quick stop by the visitor’s center, where spring had actually sprung with a row of orange crocus between the concrete parking lot and brick wall of the train- depot-turned-visitor’s-center, put us on yet another hunt for the infamous Ken. The very friendly staff at the center, told us Ken used to have a store in Galena “where the Henley’s General Store” used to be, but he now had a place out state route 20 in Elizabeth, Illinois, in the heart of Jo Daviess County. They gave us directions—go straight out route 20 about 12 miles where we would find an Antique Mall and then Ken, 8-ish miles beyond, on just the other side of Elizabeth.
True to our directions, the Antique Mall rose above Eagle Ridge as a peak in the middle of miles of barren winter farmland. It was small compared to those stretches of Kentucky Antique Malls we were used to, but there were neat, relatively clean booths that harbored farm implements, milk jugs, my beloved Peanuts’ Gang glasses, and, yes, two fantastic wooden, folding bistro chairs—One a fresh spring-bud green and the other awaiting a coat of sea-glass blue.
Encouraged by our cheap garden chairs and the hint of sun shining on the top of the ridge, we worked our way further down Route 20 in search of Ken. Through the sparsely populated, but eternally hopeful downtown Elizabeth, we drove.
And we drove, and we drove.
Our faith in the Galena Chamber ladies fading, we passed over one more hill until alas, an “Antiques” sign clattered, hanging by one chain, in the winter wind. The old house standing behind the sign certainly could have been construed as housing an architecture salvage store.
As we parked and made our way up the walk, we stepped over broken fence pickets and passed overturned planters until we found ourselves standing beneath a portico propped up by what looked to be an antique plank circa 1482. At the front door we were greeted by a runny, handwritten sign just above a doorbell and just below one of those homemade light decorations, where you glue plastic cups together, butt to butt, around a colored light, until you have a ball of…well…lighted plastic cups.
“Ring the door bell, then give me a minute,” the sign read.
We complied and we waited, although my mother causally edged her way out from under the portico, just in case.
Finally a grinning, gray-haired man with a waft of old, and perhaps overcooked, fried-chicken scent, opened the door.
“Ken!” my mom enthusiastically greets the man.
“No,” he says.
After a delightful conversation about our western Kentucky accents, his high school, football coach who was from Paducah, Kentucky and a fruitless inquiry about where Ken’s store might be, we hastily dug through what must have been generations of gas station china, broken picture frames and well-worn toys.
With one last inquiry about any antique store he might know of in Sharpton (where we now were, having driven far, far away from Elizabeth) we gave up on finding bistro chairs or Ken and his infamous architecture salvage store and took ourselves back across the ridge and the Mississippi clutching the only two garden chairs in the whole of the Midwest.
My shabby chic garden party might have to wait another month or two on the weather and the chairs, but I do have a terrific table, two perfect chairs, and a drive across the Mississippi and Illinois’ Eagle Ridge, which wasn’t a bad way to wile away my wintery spring pause.
