A tale of serendipity

This is a story about an act of serendipity that happened yesterday. To tell it, I have to begin with something that happened in 2000 or thereabouts.

Back then I was living in my yurt and while it wasn’t exactly ideal — always too hot, too cold, definitely too noisy, and without hot water — I had no immediate plans for any other abode.

Then at a garage sale, I stumbled upon a gorgeous sunken bathtub, big enough for two and never used. It was grody from being stored in a barn for years but to somebody who loves comfy tubs and can’t usually dream of affording them, it was a prize beyond measure. Especially at $5. I hauled it home in my Toyota pickup.

Very shortly after that, at another garage sale, I found a lovingly handmade bathroom vanity. It wasn’t fancy. It was rustic in style and materials. But it was one-of-a-kind and created with great care and pretty decent skill. The drawer fronts and doors were solid pine, placed on plywood frames, and it came complete with sink and faucets and prim little porcelain drawer pulls. I couldn’t believe the woman was asking only $10 for this work of love. Heck, I couldn’t believe she was selling it at all. This was some home craftsman’s beautiful baby!

I snatched it up, of course.

And inspired by the bathtub and the vanity, I built Cabin Sweet Cabin. How could I not? The bathtub would never have fit properly into the yurt and the two of them together required a real room with real walls.

So the cabin went up next to the yurt and eventually the yurt went down in a monster storm and over the years I spent many hours lounging in that big tub, admiring that vanity and wondering who created it and how it ended up being sold so ignominiously.

In 2009, I got taxed out of Cabin Sweet Cabin. I was sorry to give up its beautiful view, but not so sorry to depart its small spaces. The only things I really regretted leaving behind were that tub and that vanity. To this day I’ve missed them and continued to wonder how something like that vanity, handmade with love, ended up as anyone’s castaway.

—-

Now — one desert sojourn and two old houses later — I’m trying to figure out how to turn this old wreck’s hideous wreck of a bathroom into something non-depressing. There’s foundation repair to do first, then all the plumbing in the house has to be replaced (fragile old galvanized pipe; some of the graywater emptying out under the house). The bathroom fixtures not only need to be replaced, but the whole room has to be relocated (long story). These things are daunting. But tackling them is my next major project, do or die.

Right now, there’s only a 3/4 bath with a shower that leaves me feeling less clean when I get out than when I got in. Fortunately, I’ve got a cool bathtub awaiting its moment. Not a clawfoot, but that general type: cast iron, deep, and comfy (which is all that matters in a bathtub). It’s a little worse for 80 years of wear, but it’s cleaning up respectably.

I also have a garage-sale sink, but it’s pretty meh and needs something to set it into. Must find a decent vanity.

Well, you know me and serendipity. When I set my mind to needing some household item, 90 percent of the time it’ll soon turn up at a garage sale or on a trash heap.

And here we go …

Yesterday afternoon, I was driving out into the woods to pick blackberries and … I did a doubletake. There it was, lying on its back on a pile of tree trimmings. It had just been thrown there in the last 24 hours.

My sink and vanity.

And I don’t just mean a sink and vanity that I could use. I mean it was my sink and vanity from Cabin Sweet Cabin. The very same one. The one-and-only.

I couldn’t believe it. I got out of the car to doublecheck, and it really was. Not merely the same design. The same match of wood grains. The same small mis-alignment of the cabinet doors. The same tendency of the second shelf to pop out of its left-hand groove. Even the same sticker stuck to the bottom of one of the drawers.

Somebody has beaten it all to heck in the six years since I saw it last. They took its nice little porcelain drawer pulls. The sink will have to be replaced (but of course the sink I already have is the same size and shape; it had to be, right?). The poor thing doesn’t appear to have had a happy six years, but everything is fixable. Even the piece broken off the bottom drawer was lying right there and just needs to be glued back on. A little light refinishing and — Voila!

Not having enough room in the car for both the vanity and the pooches and all the emergency supplies in the trunk, I continued on to the berry patch. But I couldn’t get the find out of my head. It was right on the main logging road. What if somebody else grabbed it first? (I’d turned it face down so only its ugly back side showed. I’d also pulled a couple of drawers out and taken them to make it less appealing to other scavengers. But what if somebody thought it looked like good firewood?) So with only a few inches of berries in my bucket, I raced home, dropped off the dogs, emptied most of the gear from the car, and raced back. As I drove I envisioned having to wrest my vanity out of the grasp of some other scrounger by telling him its True Story. I envisioned it … just gone.

Still there! But would it even fit into Old Blue?

It would:

It was a bit of a trick to wrestle it into the trunk and a much bigger trick to wrestle it out when I got it into the driveway. But it’s HOME now!

And I’ll tell you. I’m used to serendipity. Nearly blasé about it when it comes to acquiring needed things. But this — finding one of my favorite things not just once but twice across 15 years and finding it now just when I need it again (and apparently just when it badly needs someone to be kind to it) — was downright scary.

Once my heart stops thumpeting away, I’ll take it as a sign that the terrible foundation-plumbing-and-bathroom project will go well.