Many weekends of my childhood were spent at my grandparents’ house. They lived about 20 minutes outside of town in a smaller town in the small house where my mother grew up. Their home and surrounding property were a treasure-trove of things waiting to be discovered.
My grandfather was a tinkerer and collected all manner of parts and pieces of things. He had a small workshop, a detached garage, and a fenced-in area we called the ‘junk pile.’ There were random pieces of lumber for building things with, mechanical parts for tinkering with, and recycling materials for imagining with. With the lumber pieces he built us rubber-band guns, bows with arrows, sling-shots and tree-houses. With wheels and a handle from an old push mower he built a go-kart. An empty 2-liter coke bottle (with the side cut out just right and mounted on some wood) became a bathtub for my Barbie. Once, an empty refrigerator box became our rocket-ship.
Old linens from my grandmother also contributed to our endless imaginative play. Forgotten child-sized rusted bed-springs covered with old pillows were our trampoline out in the yard. Old blankets hung from the clothesline were our fort. An old nylon tablecloth spread out across the grass with the sprinkler running was our homemade slip-n-slide. The pecans that covered the ground underneath poked through at our knees, but we had too much fun to really care.
My grandmother worked at the local bank in their small town and my grandfather did some maintenance work there off and on. Over the years, they’d collected an interesting assortment of bank detritus - so my brother and I grew up playing with old lock-boxes, ledger sheets, deposit slips, coin counters and other odd things. They also had the usual accumulation of a lifetime’s worth of household items, having lived in the same place for just about all of their married lives.
I loved the adventurous nature of the place. There was never a shortage of opportunity for imaginative play both indoors and out. My childhood was richer because of this homestead and the small town it sat in where we could roam freely.
One (of many) of the lasting impacts that these experiences gave to me was a love of typewriters. I grew up playing with a West German Olympia SM9 Portable Typewriter. As a result, typewriters became both familiar and beloved to me. I love the feel of the keys as you strike them, the sound of the slugs hitting the page, the clicking sound as you rotate the paper in through the platen, the bell that dings at the end of each line, and the smooth feel of sliding the carriage back across to start another row.
For about 8 years now I’ve low-key been looking at typewriters. I never could pull the trigger because refurbished typewriters are expensive and I didn’t feel like I had enough knowledge to gamble on a non-refurbished one without knowing if I could get it working. Once, about 6 or 7 years ago I got a cheap typewriter off of Craigslist, but the feel of it was all wrong. We just didn’t click and I didn’t keep it.
Two years ago I came across an Olympia in a salvage store. My face lit up at the joyful reunion with an old, familiar friend. But it was in really rough shape for the price and once again, without knowing anything about typewriter refurbishment, I walked away. It prompted a phone call to my dad though, to ask about the old Olympia. Did my grandmother still have it? He checked in with her and told me that she thought it was long-gone. I was disappointed but not surprised. No one had used it in years. Sporadically, I continued to look at typewriters online every now and then without ever finding the right one.