I think I have established many times that I hate cold weather. I hate cold even if it comes from an air conditioner. Perhaps that is because I have the body temperature of a turtle. (Confession: I'm really a reptilian alien that lives amongst you normal people and tries to blend in.)
Yesterday I found this photograph that I had taken in the Gaslight District of San Diego while on vacation. This is the actual thought progression that went through my head:
We once loved taking Sunday drives. Moonpie and I would head out with our cameras and no destination. (He called them our "Safaris".) We would just pick a direction out of town, drive until we saw roads with no names (extra points if they were dirt), and stop to snap pictures if we saw something interesting.
Then we stopped doing it. Instead we house-hunted every weekend for a year. Later we moved into a new neighborhood, settled into a new routine, and simply forgot about Sunday afternoon drives with our cameras.
While house hunting we revisited some of our old safari places and found all the trees gone, the roads paved, and none of the old barns in sight. In their places stood brand new subdivisions with nature-sounding names like "Pineview" or "Oakhurst", but they ironically had no trees except the obligatory Bradford pears that had been planted on each lot by a developer's landscaper. (Note: I made those names up so I wouldn't point fingers.)
I hope we will get back into the habit of taking our Sunday drives because somewhere on a back road there is an old barn that is a particularly lovely shade of red. It also has a particularly lovely rusted roof. It is just waiting for someone with a camera to record that it ever existed because chances are it will soon be gone.
I was looking through photos that I had taken, but never posted. One of those was of Sylvan's Jewelers at 1500 Main Street in Columbia, SC.
In 1890, brothers Gustaf (Gus) Jonson, a watchmaker, and Johannes (Joe) Bengtson Sylvan, a jeweler, left their home in Sweden to seek their fortune in America. They booked passage to the port city of Savannah, Georgia and both found work there.
After that the brothers split up. In 1897 Gus opened a business in Columbia, SC. Joe joined him in 1898. In 1905, the brothers acquired a Second Empire style building on the corner of Main and Hampton Streets, the first large building constructed in Columbia after the Civil War.
They opened at the new location on June 24, 1905, where Sylvan's Jewelers is still headquartered today. In 1906, the brothers installed a beautiful four-sided clock on the sidewalk in front of the store, now a beloved local landmark.
You can learn more about the history of this location here.
