Source: Wikimedia Commons
There was a small china pot on my great-aunt's dresser with a round hole in the middle of the lid, and I spent years assuming it was a…
Maya Linton
Source: Wikimedia Commons
A sampler was not decoration. It was closer to a diploma.
A worked piece demonstrating a girl's command of letters, numbers and a range of stitches was…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The phrase I kept hearing from older relatives was that they had slept on straw, and I took it as a figure of speech about being poor. It…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
I grew up assuming a snow fence was a wall that stopped snow from getting onto the road, and that the gaps in it were a way of…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
A narrow steel runner is the whole invention, and it is why a sled slides instead of ploughing.
A broad flat bottom pushes snow ahead of itself…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The thing that strikes me about every old toolbox I have been shown is that the stones are the most worn objects in it. Hollowed in the middle,…