Vegetable Keeper

In the late 90’s, the house of my co-worker, TJ, burned with a total loss of all the furniture. Most of it could be replaced but there was one item that couldn’t – a vegetable keeper that TJ’s wife had bought in the mid-80’s at a country fair in Arkansas while he was in the Air Force.

Knowing that I was a woodworker, TJ asked me if I could build another one. I asked TJ to take pictures of the burned original with a yard stick in the pictures. From those, I developed measured drawings. The only other changes I made in the design was that I built the replacement out of white oak and used furniture grade techniques in its construction. The original was pine and screwed together.

I delivered the reproduction to TJ and his son on Memorial Day. They took it home after stopping to buy some cookbooks and potatoes nad onions. They slipped it into the kitchen, filled it with the cook books and vegetables without TJ’s wife knowing about it. Tj then called his wife, who was in the basement, using, as he said, “a tone that would really make her mad,” then TJ and his children hid in the living room so she would have to go through the kitchen.

TJ described what happened next: “She came storming up the stairs and through the kitchen and then there was total silence, then we heard her start to cry. She cried for several minutes until she said that the potatoes and onions were in the wrong compartments.”