The picture: yes, the picture. It's from a visit my mom and I took to the Wood Stove and Doll (and mechanical music, and button) Museum of Thorndike, Me.
This is from the mechanized doll display. Bea scavenges for old dolls each winter when they are in Florida, while Joe creates the mechanical displays. They make you wait outside while they power up the room, so that you can walk in when the Barbies are already prancing, the puppets swooshing, the toy cars honking. The second is a massive warehouse of mechanized music machines--a wonderful old hurdy-gurdy, countless player pianos, including an early version in which the player, in the form of a giant wooden block with fingers, sat on the stool before the piano, and when wound-up, played the piano from the outside, by pressing down on the keys with its wooden fingers. Joe scoots around in a mechanized chair but as we moved through his display, he left the chair behind as he drew us from one machine to the next.
The third is their wood stove showroom, which is their main business--they have the contract for all the wood stoves in the Cracker Barrel stores--and the fourth is the button room. It's the smallest but had the best story attached to it. Apparently Bea came into a little bit of money at a certain time, an insurance payout, after a man tried to break into their mechanic's shop. (This, at least, is what I inferred. I believe her words were, "Someone trieda hit and I got a check.") She used this money, $25,000, to purchase a button collection. Here's where this story gets appropriate for a website about a wedding: as Bea explained, Joe always trusted her with the money and didn't interfere. But when he learned she spent a check that big on buttons, he said to her with a sigh, "Oh Bea, there's no money in buttons." But did Bea show him: that winter in Florida, she worked night and day on that button collection: arranging it thematically, on handmade cards, so beautiful that in February, at winter's end, she sold it at an annual button show, of which one imagines there are several in Florida, to a woman with a huge collection and a lot of money, for seventy-five grand. "So I showed Joe," Bea says, "there's some money in buttons."
