Dude, where's my bench?

As I mentioned in my Haute Mamas post from yesterday, someone "borrowed" the bench from our front yard while Bill and I were in Austin.

Bill was lamenting the theft of the bench when I suggested that maybe someone actually did borrow it and just forgot to return it. He said I was being naive and that it was stolen. I'm having a hard time believing that.

I mean, how could someone or someones walk into our yard and carry the thing off? It's heavy and cumbersome and since I haven't sealed the wood in several years, it's all splintery, too.

Then the question arises of who would want it? It's all splintery and the black paint is chipping off the white paint which is covering the cast iron in so many layers that ... well, it's just not very attractive.

But we liked it.

We liked to sit on it. We liked to display our pumpkins on it:
Margaret and her little girl friends liked to play on it and lay on it and pretend to sleep on it, covering themselves with newspapers like tiny, Central-Park bums.

Our crumby bench got sat on a lot during the nice-weather months when we'd have people over for the expressed reason of sitting around in our front yard. Now all we have left is crusty, plastic lawn chairs.

Oh what a sad spring and summer it will be without our worn, but loved bench.

Good-bye, bench! We'll miss you! Oh and we hope that your crappy slats split and cause the person who stole you to smack their fat melon on a concrete curb ... or something.