A Love Letter...

Remember our sweet little Swoon-Ella?

If you recall from a month or so ago, we travelled to Kansas City on a quest to find the perfect gate to place between our front counter and our baking area.  We found perfection at Antiquities and Oddities and claimed her for our very own (faux Baldwin Brother not included).  We decided to name her Swoon-Ella because she made us so happy and she has been hanging out in the vacant space next to PJP Buttonwood, just waiting for her grand debut.

Well.

Well, a few weeks ago in a rare moment of not baking or obsessing about baking or painting or obsessing about painting, we all ended up in Osage Beach on the first Saturday in months where it was warm enough to actually remember that living in a polar vortex might have an end.  We happened by a shop and stopped dead in our tracks at something we saw.  We both said at the same time:  "WE NEED THIS."

You ever meet someone and know within seconds that you will like them forever?  Or let Starbucks add a shot of vanilla to your iced coffee and know that you can probably never drink it any other way?  Or spend years thinking that the M&M blizzard at Dairy Queen was the only way to go until you tried the Butterfinger blizzard and thought "well, why did I wait so long to make a switch?"  Or scoff at people who binge on Netflix series and then find something you can't stop watching and feel like you joined a secret club?

What we found is all sort of like that.  When I put it in terms that Behind-The-Scenes-Tech-Guru Jason could relate with, it is like when NASA says they just keep finding more galaxies and then everyone's mind is blown because no one ever knew all this time that those galaxies were just there and waiting to be discovered.  (As a side note, he didn't find that metaphor persuasive at all to justify the cash I was getting ready to lay down for our dreams...it was really a last ditch effort but my knowledge about space is far eclipsed by my knowledge of coffee, ice cream, and Netflix).

Does this all sound rather dramatic?  Let's hope, because as a rule, Jeanne and I are fairly dramatic people and we either like something or we don't.  And this, this we LOVE.

The person selling it asked $500 for it and because we had Swoon-Ella at home, we walked away that day, but the image of this gate sat in both of our minds.  We had conversations about the gate, stood and imagined the gate in our space, and basically discussed our gate desire until Jeanne caved and call the guy and haggled the price down to $400.

Now this darling thing will go between the front counter and the back baking area.  Our other gate is still very much in our hearts and we have big plans for it.  We have zero regrets about Gate One and we adhere to a stringent "the more, the merrier" policy regarding antique, weather torn, rusted gates.

For right now, he (it feels like a "he", right?) is chilling next door with Swoon-Ella.  We keep popping over to look at him...sort of like you do when you seriously like someone and you would like to eat ice cream with them and tell them a whole bunch of times how cute they are.  Or is that just us?