happy birthday to Pat

Winter has finally showed itself as the cold windy snowy gotta shovel the driveway again nuisance it is. Momma pumpkins and Poppa pumpkins are buried under a foot of snow waiting to surprise us in spring. I think I can finally put the lawn mower away. With our ability to garden severely limited by the snow, what can we do? Why take a road trip to the northern most point in West Virginia and visit its most famous destination, the Homer Laughlin Pottery Company, home of Fiesta Ware.

Newell is an easy 2 hour trip through increasingly wooded and hilly terrain. I never tire of the trip. This time I missed our intended exit because I wasn’t paying attention. We were rewarded by a fun ride down route 7 through what Chicagoans call the “woods.” We passed a concrete statuary, or what I would call a yard ornamentation place, in Lisbon. We will visit the place in the early spring when lawn ornamentation season is just starting, because you can never have too many concrete rabbits in your yard. This little sidetrack didn’t add much time to our trip. Besides, nothing starts till we get there and we got there in plenty of time to buy everything Pat wanted.

The Homer Laughlin plant is right on the bluffs overlooking the Ohio River. As you look out over the river you can almost see pioneers on flat boats making their way to the future. But we didn’t make this trip for a history lesson. We came for Fiesta Ware and Pat worked her list. There seems to be a division of labor as I watched the customers. Husbands for the most part mill about waiting for their wives to finish. I dive in. I’m not driving 2 hours to mill about. I can mill about in my own driveway. I want to buy plates, actually bowls, big bowls, medium size bowls, and little bowls. We found a new-to-us selection called the Bistro Collection. It is great looking diner ware, just the kind you would expect to see in a chrome and Formica breakfast and lunch joint. I got a starter set. Pat picked out a bunch of stuff that we were missing and a 2 person set of a discontinued color. If you don’t act on discontinued Fiesta ware when you’re at the factory store, you are stuck with the secondary market. And guess where the secondary market gets their stuff? Yeah, the factory store.

When we got home Pat called out to me. “I got the wrong size plate.” Now there was a time when I would have said, or at least thought, actually definitely only thought, “bummer.” Without hesitation, (now this is a Peter Cook moment from The Princess Bride -- "twue wove") I said, “we’ll go back tomorrow and get other stuff too." So back we went, through a snow storm this time. We got the plates Pat needed and a bunch of other fiesta ware we didn’t know we needed.

The Fiesta ware colors are so bright and happy that they will put a smile on your face no matter what mood you find yourself in.