Let's Hear It For National Sewing Month!!

Give me an S, give me an E, give me a W..well you get the idea!! A huge cheer for National Sewing Month and all those with needle pricked fingers who so love to sew!!
As I said before I started sewing at age 5 by hand and got my very own first sewing machine at age 8..and from there a life long love of sewing machines became a collection.
I could never part with a sewing machine and had every one I ever had for many years. But due to divorce and moving a few times, most got displaced along the way. But when we moved out to the country to a huge house with 25 acres, I began my obsession all over again. I had a very nice Janome machine, but all I ever really wanted was another old timie Singer. Well to my amazement I found a sewing machine stash right on our new property that would be hard to equal!
The former owners had made themselves quite a dump over the back of the hill behind the out shed and over that hill I found a treasure trove of the past 50 years, the former owners had dumped there. For one thing they must have burned through appliances, large and small, like no bodies business! There was a ton of toasters from days gone past, waffle irons, crock pots, phonographs, cameras, hair dryers..you name it, it was down there. I found old peddle cars, even one like the fire truck I had as a child! At that time you could find those in very bad shape going for over 500 bucks at flea markets down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, which is about 50 miles from us.
I was digging in that wonderland of dumped treasures one day, trying to pull out some old galvanized tubs to use for flower beds, when I saw what was the best find ever for me! A very old Singer sewing machine!! I was so excited I could hardly breathe! I dug for hours, ignoring cuts I was getting from many pieces of buried broken glass to go after my rewards. At the end of my burrowing on that first day, I had found 3 very old Singers, an old Kenmore and an oldie from Montgomery Wards. I was giddy and talking a mile a minute about my finds when Ross got home that night!! You would of thought I struck black gold! To me I had found Fort Knox!!
Ross made me a shelf from some very old almost petrified wood to place them on in our Keeping room. Most where pretty messed up and the graphics were about gone and could probably never actually run again without many hours of labor. I made one into a lamp and used 2 of the old Singers as bookends with some of my crochet and tatting work draped over them..it was quite lovely, if I say so myself.
Of course by now I had my newer machines with a ton of doodads on them in my sewing room and did use some of the finds (I found about 6 more before I stopped digging) as decoration in my sewing room. I would sew and look at those old timers and think of the wonderful things that someone may have made on them and of Aunt Myra and her old treadle machine.
Sad to say but we came home one day to find our home gone, struck by lightning and burned to the ground! We lost everything we had, 50 plus years of my life now gone.
After the shock and tears my thoughts go often to those old machines, maybe someday I will have the physical and mental and emotional fortitude to go up to the remains of the house and see what of those old iron machines are still surviving..