Although I am always quick to say that I am NOT a gardener, I have been spending quite a bit of time in my garden recently. Just not working with plants. No, I've been 'planting' a garden gnome.
He's not just any garden gnome. When I moved house two years ago, I took with me a concrete garden gnome - and a huge thank you to the removalists who managed to bring him along. It was not an easy task.
Some family treasures are small, portable and easy to take with you when you move. Some, like my gnome, are not. He is about 50 cm tall, and my family purchased two of them for my father's 50th birthday, back in January 1976. When we sold the family home my sister and I decided we wanted to keep one gnome each.
There is a story behind our gnomes. At the time we first brought them, there was a rash of gnome-napping happening where we lived, with gnomes disappearing from gardens, never to be seen again. Dad was determined that no one was going to 'nap' his gnomes. So he filled the concrete shells with solid concrete, then installed them on concrete plinths about 30 cm in diameter and 10 cm thick, out in our front yard.
They weigh a ton. Over the years people have tried to steal them numerous times. No one has gotten them more than 2 or 3 metres. Usually when someone tried to steal a gnome, we would get up in the morning to find him tilted on his side or lying prone, and Dad would enlist the help of a few neighbors to help get him upright again. Everyone in town knew the house with the gnomes.
Occasionally Dad would repaint them, in bright red and blue for their jackets, leggings and hats, with silver for the fish each gnome held. One of them had the tip of his hat broken off during a particularly enthusiastic gnome-nappng attempt. Dad found the broken bit and glued it back on. Those gnomes were a part of my childhood.
In my new home (I've been there two years this week!) my gnome now lives in the back yard. On a little platform surrounded by small white stones and edged with a double row of creamy yellow bricks, he has pride of place and I see him every morning from my kitchen table as I have breakfast. And every time I smile and think of my father, so determined that NO ONE was going to kidnap one of HIS gnomes.
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