Kathleen Valentine by My Last Romance, other passions Page B
Authors: My Last Romance, other passions
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a charming thing to me that this huge, wise, self-assured man shies in the face of my desire for him. It has been like that from the beginning. The man I met on my first foray into the no-man’s land of the Seaman’s Haven was warm, friendly and cooperative. If he felt desire for me he never let it show but now when I catch him looking at me he brims over with it.
I hang my coat on the hook inside the kitchen door and pour steaming coffee into a stoneware mug. We talk about the work I should be doing as I sit across the table from him watching as he pushes the air from the once-risen dough, divides and shapes it into loaves. He places them neatly on a wooden cutting board, patting them into the shape he wants and covering them with a clean towel. I look at the thick veins that stand out on the insides of his flour dusted forearms and squirm inside. My clothes seem too close to my skin. My thighs tremble as he rubs his hands together over the bowl crumbling the remains of the sticky dough off of his fingers. He is a quiet man when he is with me. Despite the severity of his stern, masculine world there are little touches of him everywhere—a battered copper pot sprouting spiky bright green chives sits on the windowsill. Leather Wayang puppets he carried in a sea trunk from Indonesia hang on the walls. A collection of scrimshaw pastry crimpers are arranged in a glass case in the dining room. He told me that lonely young sailors spent endless hours at sea carving them from whale bones to present to the young lady of their fancy when they returned. Hopefully, the young lady would be sufficiently pleased to then bake him a pie.
The reasons for my being here are simple. The Board of Directors of the Haven needed to raise funds to replace the roof and some storm windows. Stash, the recently hired manager, had come up with an intriguing plan. The attic, he discovered during his systematic reorganization of his new domain, was packed with a hundred and fifty years worth of debris left by wandering seamen. He could only guess at the history of most of the treasures—were they carried home for a sweetheart who proved to be unfaithful or were they simply too cumbersome to continue on in the sea bag of a footloose adventurer? Since most of the items had no name on them, the Board, at Stash’s suggestion, decided they were now the property of the Haven and should be put to good use by being auctioned off to raise funds for the repairs. An auction committee was formed and I, faced with a long winter, volunteered to take on the job of sorting through, organizing, cataloguing and arranging for any needed appraisals of the treasures.
Thus began a long series of stark winter afternoons with Stash as my only companion.
I didn’t fall in love with him at first. I liked him, of course. He was soft-spoken and entertaining—identifying many of the items that we unwrapped and telling me what he knew of their origins and possible histories. Mostly there were clothes—a lot of silk, robes and shirts and kimonos and shawls, corsets made of baleen and whale bones, jewelry and carved combs for ladies hair. But there were toys, scrimshaw items, carved ivory, tribal masks, baskets of every shape and size, tools, amulets, blue and white china that Stash told me had served as ballast in ships full of tea returning from the East. There were hundreds of books, curious musical instruments, knives, wooden boxes, and many varieties of matryoshka—nested dolls from Russia and the Orient. The afternoons began to feel like an endless Christmas that only Stash and I shared. As each box was unwrapped and its contents examined it seemed my world expanded.
"Let me see that," he said as I unwrapped a beautifully carved shallow wooden box enclosed in glass.
"Look," I handed it to him. "There are hundreds of seashells—all different colors. That must have taken someone a long time to make."
Stash grinned as he turned it around in his enormous hands. "Well,
I hang my coat on the hook inside the kitchen door and pour steaming coffee into a stoneware mug. We talk about the work I should be doing as I sit across the table from him watching as he pushes the air from the once-risen dough, divides and shapes it into loaves. He places them neatly on a wooden cutting board, patting them into the shape he wants and covering them with a clean towel. I look at the thick veins that stand out on the insides of his flour dusted forearms and squirm inside. My clothes seem too close to my skin. My thighs tremble as he rubs his hands together over the bowl crumbling the remains of the sticky dough off of his fingers. He is a quiet man when he is with me. Despite the severity of his stern, masculine world there are little touches of him everywhere—a battered copper pot sprouting spiky bright green chives sits on the windowsill. Leather Wayang puppets he carried in a sea trunk from Indonesia hang on the walls. A collection of scrimshaw pastry crimpers are arranged in a glass case in the dining room. He told me that lonely young sailors spent endless hours at sea carving them from whale bones to present to the young lady of their fancy when they returned. Hopefully, the young lady would be sufficiently pleased to then bake him a pie.
The reasons for my being here are simple. The Board of Directors of the Haven needed to raise funds to replace the roof and some storm windows. Stash, the recently hired manager, had come up with an intriguing plan. The attic, he discovered during his systematic reorganization of his new domain, was packed with a hundred and fifty years worth of debris left by wandering seamen. He could only guess at the history of most of the treasures—were they carried home for a sweetheart who proved to be unfaithful or were they simply too cumbersome to continue on in the sea bag of a footloose adventurer? Since most of the items had no name on them, the Board, at Stash’s suggestion, decided they were now the property of the Haven and should be put to good use by being auctioned off to raise funds for the repairs. An auction committee was formed and I, faced with a long winter, volunteered to take on the job of sorting through, organizing, cataloguing and arranging for any needed appraisals of the treasures.
Thus began a long series of stark winter afternoons with Stash as my only companion.
I didn’t fall in love with him at first. I liked him, of course. He was soft-spoken and entertaining—identifying many of the items that we unwrapped and telling me what he knew of their origins and possible histories. Mostly there were clothes—a lot of silk, robes and shirts and kimonos and shawls, corsets made of baleen and whale bones, jewelry and carved combs for ladies hair. But there were toys, scrimshaw items, carved ivory, tribal masks, baskets of every shape and size, tools, amulets, blue and white china that Stash told me had served as ballast in ships full of tea returning from the East. There were hundreds of books, curious musical instruments, knives, wooden boxes, and many varieties of matryoshka—nested dolls from Russia and the Orient. The afternoons began to feel like an endless Christmas that only Stash and I shared. As each box was unwrapped and its contents examined it seemed my world expanded.
"Let me see that," he said as I unwrapped a beautifully carved shallow wooden box enclosed in glass.
"Look," I handed it to him. "There are hundreds of seashells—all different colors. That must have taken someone a long time to make."
Stash grinned as he turned it around in his enormous hands. "Well,
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