Treasures

Mr. F and I struck it rich this past weekend, rich I tell you!

I've been looking forward to this past Saturday morning for a few weeks now, it's been circled on my calendar for months. It was plant sale AND book sale day in a town not far from here, just over the border in lovely southern New Hampshire.

We spent $56.25. Okay, that's slightly less than it what it costs to fill both our gas tanks these days, but I think we got a lot of value for the money. Our spoils included:

A lilac bush
An adorable baby Japanese Maple tree (it's probably not much bigger than Baby Feeble at this point!)
Four hardy (perennial) geraniums, a.k.a. cranesbill
Six 'Early Girl' tomato plants (for $1.75! You can't buy a pound of fresh tomatoes for that much anymore!)
Six cherry tomato plants
Six bell pepper plants
One tarragon plant
One basil plant
One Italian flat-leaf parsley plant

All those plants cost us $33.25. At the nursery we might have gotten three or four perennial plants for that much.

Then at the book sale:

The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
Sonnets from the Portuguese, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Rape of the Lock (and other works), Alexander Pope
Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand (published in 1899!!)
Sophocles in English Verse, Oxford Press
Aeschylus in English Verse, Oxford Press
The Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam
Captains Courageous, Rudyard Kipling
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Animal Farm, George Orwell
The Deerslayer, James Fenimore Cooper
Three Complete Novels by E.M. Forster (Howards End, A Room With a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread)
The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

...plus an old hymnal and several old children's books that we remember from our childhood.

So we went heavy on the classics yet again. When we were dating, both of us were elated to learn that we each had a personal goal of collecting and reading as many classic works of literature as we could. So we've been building on our collection for a while now, little by little. We got all of those today for a grand total of $23.00!! You can't buy one hardcover book these days for less than that, and here we got armloads of hardcovers, some published seventy or more years ago. We feel like we hit the jackpot.

Now we've just got to figure out A. Where to plant everything and B. Whether to re-read our favorite old books or delve into works we haven't read yet. (Immediately upon arriving home I dove into the children's books, then read Sonnets from the Portuguese cover to cover. I love Elizabeth Barrett Browning!)

Oh happy day!