Some photos of C today, playing dress up & eating cookies at her great grandmother’s house.  (I know I need to crop the glaring light from the kitchen out of several of them, but toooo tired to do it at the moment. Decided to just go ahead and slap ‘em up as-is. Will fix later. )

The bed reflected in the photo with the large mirrored armoire was brought back to Tennessee from New Orleans by slaves sent to pick it up in a horse drawn wagon by C’s great, great, great, great grandfather. The bed was supposed to be delivered with a full canopy, but the canopy was mysteriously missing when it arrived. Our (many times great) grandfather repeatedly quizzed the men he had sent to pick it up as to where the damn canopy had gone missing, but they told him they had no idea what had happened to it. And they stuck to their story…forever.

Apparently, everyone in our family always suspected that the men had gotten cold on the trip, and had simply burned the mahogany and silk canopy one night to make a toasty campfire (good for them if they did.) But no one knows for sure. So for 150 years, the bed had no canopy, until about 25 years ago when my grandparents finally had a local furnituremaker build one. So now the bed has the canopy it was always supposed to have.

C likes to jump on the bed, and pretend she’s “sweeeeping.”  My grandmother – C’s great grandmother – says she liked to play on it when she was a little girl, too.