and it is time. to put it all away. the christmas trees are piling up in those grind-them-into-mulch places. the new year has arrived and with it the giant plastic bins come back upstairs. i’ll soon – with some reluctance – gently put away all the tiny trees, my mom and dad’s shiny brite ornaments, my children’s framed note to santa, the silver and snow-white of winter, all the gestures and mementos of the holiday season. the living room will look bland for the first few days, until i get used to it again.
it’s always a time to look around and imagine. imagine change of some sort – changing a look, rearranging, culling out, even minimizing. i run around – in my head – with ideas, things i’ve seen in catalogs or magazines, on hgtv or online – pondering, maybe doing a wee bit of rearranging here and there – thinking i’m too used to it to see it all as it is.
and then i stop and look. as if i just walked into our home for the first time. what do i see? what stands out? what gets lost? and, mostly, how does it feel?
we have both many hand-me-downs and many vintage pieces (read: old/re-purposed). they are in every room in our house. i wonder what our home would look like if we had started fresh and chose everything in it for specific purposes. how would it look with a narrow wood and pipe dinner table instead of my treasured sisu music productions’ office oversized teak table? how would it look minus the old desk and chifforobe in my studio? how would it be to change out the old cabinets in the kitchen – like most home-buyers these days? or to replace the cedar chest and old china closet in the dining room with cabinetry more suited for the space? to exchange the dresser i got from lois or the chest i got from miss peggy, the chimney cabinet from hayesville, nc or the ones i got at a wholesale show for my office space? the re-painted wicker set from the lanai in florida or the butterfly chair from one of the kid’s dormrooms? the gingham print reclining wingchair with fabric on the back that our angel babycat – in brattier moments – redesigned? and what about all those branches and rocks, driftwood and aspen and hagstones and miniature boulders, flat top red rock, tiny cairns?
it is a time to clean out – both figuratively and metaphorically. the beginning of the new year pulls at most of us that way. i’m already starting to rise to the culling part of that equation. though it’s never easy. give away, sell, find people who need the excess things we have.
the rest?
the replacing? the new purchases? the changing out? the shuffling around, the rearranging? not so much.
it’s home. it feels like home. and we’re used to it.
corningware is a fact of life. my mom had corningware, my sister had corningware, my sister-in-law had corningware, i have corningware. there’s no getting around it. it just is.
it doesn’t really matter that there are other cooking vessels out there – fancier, more expensive, touting evenly distributed heat and cast-iron goodness. i was – from growing up with aluminum stock pots and the blue cornflower pattern – predestined for my “spice-o-life” corningware set. in a nod to bougie, i also have a couple pieces of the “french white” oven-to-table elegance. one of these days i may break out of this. the la creuset people are patiently waiting.
we go to antique shoppes often. someone asked me if we buy things. tilting my head to think about that question, i realized that we don’t buy things all that often, though we have a pension for repurposing old stuff so there are definitely exceptions to that. we have a merry old time, though, wandering around, telling stories and laughing. why is it that we tell stories, you ask? well, it’s because so much of the stuff we c.u.r.r.e.n.t.l.y. have (or, ok, have had) is also stocked in the antique stores. it’s not limited to the corningware and our pyrex mushroom-pattern mixing bowls. it’s the books we read, the albums we listened to, the games we played, the clothing styles we had, the leather tooled purses, the belt buckles we recognize, the peanuts mugs, the sylvester and tweety glassware, the woolen mill spools and the rug beaters i collected in the early 90s. it’s the vases passed down, etched glass platters, the linens from finland, the beer steins from europe, the flour sifters, the handmade yoyo quilts, the happy face wastebasket. i have bins of ebay-worthy treasures. vintage. wink-wink.
one of these days – hopefully in the far, far away future, his paintings and my cds will find their way into an antique store somewhere. people will pass by and they’ll say, “oh geeez. remember when we had a cd player? what year was that again?”
in the meanwhile, we will relish becoming antiques ourselves.
the last time i bought a brand new car – right off the lot – was 2003 or 2004. littlebabyscion was almost brand new – with 250 miles on it and that was in 2006. the new-car-smell and negotiating with salespersons and then, of course, their managers…both memories in the distant past.
littlebabyscion is getting up there. 260somethingthousand miles on it now. wrinkles and groans and a little rust here and there and a few mechanical issues here and there, it’s a workhorse that just refused to start last friday. dashboard lights i don’t think i have seen before appeared right before my eyes. we suspect the alternator.
but – in our one car driveway – there LBS sat…in back of big red, blocking the path out.
the jumpstart hooked up to big red made LBS chortle. starting for a moment and trying to chug the engine alive, it stalled and the handbook and google informed us to “go to the scion dealer” and do not pass go. our truly amazing mechanic steve will be its destination when the tow truck comes.
but – on friday – we were left without any transportation.
saturday we pushed the scion down the driveway toward the apron and managed to thread big red through the space between the old brick wall and the front of LBS. the only way out was across the yard, but the yard – all trenched and mounded up from the water line replacement – has seen better days anyway. we rolled our eyes looking at the tire tracks across the snow in our front yard. david suggested moving the couch out front.
we have some real old stuff. between a 1998 ford f150 and our xb and our vw and our stove and mixing bowls and corningware and this very laptop – not to mention hand-me-downs and never-been-replaceds, we qualify as our own antique shoppe. when seeking a replacement adapter cord, the woman on the apple support line told me that my computer was “vintage” and that they didn’t even carry the cord for it. (she was actually wrong about that part as i directed her attention to the correct cord on the apple store.) see…you can rube goldberg things and keep them going when need be.
and as two artists for the majority of our lives – in between and in conjunction or simultaneously with other positions and career arcs – rube goldberging is of necessity. i’d like to also think of it as having a smaller carbon footprint. admittedly, the efficient energy consumption of a new stove vs the half-life of a decomposing stove in a dump somewhere leaves much room for debate. but we, as artists, don’t always have the luxury of replacing things at whim – or even in a longer term plan – and we try to do our best at being responsible citizens of this beautiful world.
i asked steve once what we were going to do when littlebabyscion reached 300,000 miles. he looked at me, surprised, and said, “keep driving it.”
yes, yes. i suppose we will.
we pushed littlebabyscion back up the driveway so big red could fit.
i was grateful when they attached a name to it – shabby chic. my inclination to love things with the texture of peeling paint and a bit rough-hewn was vindicated…wait!…not only vindicated, but reinforced by the decorating fashion industry. phew! that meant that the old screen doors on the wall, the glass-less window frames tucked here and there, the chopped-off-side-of-the-vintage-desk end table, the vintage black suitcases, the metal radiator grate catty-corner in the foyer, the old door laid horizontal on horses, the tin ceiling panels…these were all fashion statements and not statements of making-do-decor. such a relief.
i must say, however, that i wouldn’t have changed anything anyway. these all make me happy. they are cozy and warm and, mostly, they have history. and it’s the history-that-remains-a-mystery and the history-that-i-know-a-smidge-about that i love. i had no idea whose screen door screens these were when i got them at a wholesale trade show years ago but i could imagine the sound they made when they slammed shut. nor did i know where the old black window with one colored glass square in my studio was from. the old four-foot tall window frames were being thrown out of the historic lakefront building where i had my offices, making room for new windows. i couldn’t bear to see them in the trashpile and the way i adored those offices made it easy to take them home. someone literally chopped off the side of the old desk leaving three drawers and a rough edge and selling it in the estate sale for $5. you can’t see the rough edge unless you really look and this piece has been in the living room for years and years now, serving a purpose and feeling loved. the tin, well, who knows? what i do know is that they make marvelous places to magnet photographs and cards and tiny little signs with sayings that help each day. so, yeah, i guess my point is that whether i know the back-story or not, i really appreciate the warmth of long living they bring. they sit alongside many rocks and sticks that have made short and long journeys home with me, in the back of little baby scion or in backpacks with corks that come home from times spent with my children and moments i want to remember.
i haven’t purchased a lot of brand new furniture. there was the first herculon-fabric overstuffed couch with two matching overstuffed chairs, a tweed in lovely shades of very-early 1980s brown.
well over a decade later that was donated to a youth group and a new couch in mid 1990s floral barn red and forest green with a reclining wingchair of red and white checks made its way into the living room. both of those pieces still have a place in the house – though no longer in the living room. the couch, still very comfortable, is covered with a black slipcover and has a place in the sitting room with a hand-me-down lazyboy, an old farm table and an antique copper boiler tub that stores our roadtrip writings.
there’s a black leather couch in the living room now that has been there over a decade. it shares the space with the old secretary that was my brother’s, the bistro table that was in the second story porch of my old offices, a vintage typewriter 20 bought me for my birthday a couple years ago, a few paintings i spattered, the desk-turned-end-table you now know too much about and the driftwood we brought back from a trip to long island. the two big branches we painted white and potted to hold happy lights still stand steadfastly happying up the room and each day i pass them i wonder if they are too holiday-ish. i quickly reject this as too big a decision and plug them in.
it is in recent days i have had the good fortune of hearing from a dear old friend i taught with in my first two years of teaching way-back-when. we soon will have a phone chat and catch up on everything from a-z. what lois doesn’t realize is that i have thought of her simply every day…as it is her dresser that stands in our bedroom of vintage size that couldn’t really accommodate one of those bedroom suites you see in magazines. instead, this old sturdy five-drawer sits opposite the windows of the sunrise and hold my dad’s peanut can, one of the precious items i have of my sweet poppo’s, the planters peanut blue metal can he tucked in his drawer that always held a few dollars and was the place he sent you if you were going to go pick up the pizza.
as i look at the top of that dresser right this second, pictures of d and me and of my beloved children are on top. there is a small piece of the carpet padding from the irresponsible-gasket-flood waiting to go in the special box next to the yago-sangria-wine-bottle-turned-lamp i made when i was 19 and there is a card in a glass frame that reads: “someday, the light will shine like a sun through my skin and they will say, what have you done with your life? and though there are many moments i think i will remember, in the end, i will be proud to say, i was one of us.”
all of this – the stuff with history i know, the stuff with history i don’t know, the peeling paint, the rough-hewn, the used and the it-took-me-a-long-time-to-decide new…all of it – around me reminds me of that and is the connecting thread. of the concentric circles of me, of us. probably that’s why “shabby chic” speaks to me. it is most definitely why it works for me.
maybe we’ll go back. this sassy coffee pot sits at one of our favorite antique shops and drew my eye. we’ll be sure to know where to put it and, perhaps, how to use it before we maybe go get it.
we were on our way to cape cod and the sign salvage chic antiques stopped us. four old aluminum coffee pots later, we left the store. they are now part of a five-aluminum-coffee-pot collection on a shelf in our kitchen; instead of a canister set, these coffee pots keep all our different teas easily accessible.
anyone who knows us knows that we love our coffee. anyone who knows us knows that we also love re-purposing old stuff. but not the fancy stuff. old aluminum coffee pots, old black vintage suitcases, old wooden boxes. they are the treasures around us. they hold special mementos, nespresso coffee pods, clothespins for the ukulele band, art supplies, rocks we have collected on beaches, in woods, from high sandstone precipices or red rock canyons deep. they are history and they are new. both true.
when we need a break, a few moments to lose ourselves, we will either hike or go to one of our local favorite antique shops. things of worry will gently fall off as we walk through woods or aisles of things-that-remind-us of other times, memories, or maybe inspire us with a beckon to be brought home.
we choose carefully and deliberately. for ourselves and for the gifts we get others. it’s never the fancy stuff, but it’s the stuff that stops us, draws our eye, beckons to be purchased and re-treasured.
he stopped. walking in the top floor room of a nearby antique mall we love to visit, david was struck suddenly by – of all things – tv trays. “we had these!” he exclaimed. “growing up, we had these exact trays!” i immediately took pictures. i knew i would send them to his sister later. for a few moments, he was back in colorado, clipping the tv tray into place, surrounded by his sister, his brothers, his mom and dad.
when we have free time, we peruse antique stores. sometimes we are lucky to amble with our dearest friends. it takes time to walk through antiques – old stuff that connects us to a galore of stories. we stop and tell tales, sharing, laughing, amazed at how long ago are the moments we are speaking of. pole lamps that reach floor-to-ceiling, games, figurines, wooden crates, orange and turquoise vinyl furniture, dolls and toys, china, record albums, ancient suitcases with no wheels, teapots and patterns of corelle-ware, mixing bowls and corningware…everything is part of some moment we have passed through, maybe forgotten, but now surfacing with the touch of some item.
i am really thready, without physical reminders. but with them i can literally touch yesterdays…full of emotion, sometimes pining for times-gone-by. i relish the stories, the re-visiting. i can almost, just almost remember our tv trays. but not quite. i can’t quite put my mind’s-eye-finger on them. maybe we will stumble across them one of these days. and i will stop short.
in the meanwhile, just wondering…what did your tv trays look like?
what’s that saying?…’one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’? a walk through our house shows we drew this chicken nugget from our own lives. i’ve written before, ok many times before, about the stones in our home, the sticks and feathers, the old doors and windows, re-purposed old aluminum coffee pots as canisters, old stoves still working, my dad’s workbench wooden boxes, pieces of old desks or old wooden crates as end tables. everyone has their own definition of “treasure”; for us it’s just not always the shiny new stuff.
this weekend marks another earth day, a celebration of support for our beloved home planet. more than 193 countries now mark this day as a day of awareness and honoring. as we move about our days, we make seemingly miniscule decisions about how to handle our little piece of the globe. but each one of these has an impact and the ever-widening ripples will either be adding to the protection of mother earth or contributing to the harm that will adversely effect our earth in the long-term. yes, those blue recycling bags cost a bundle, but it helps. yes, those kitchen cabinets might look old for you, but they’d look better in someone else’s home (who maybe doesn’t have cabinets) than in the dump.
maybe a few sticks or rocks placed here or there in our home reminds us of all that. they are treasures for me. they always have been. we can’t fit all our treasures into our literal ‘special box’ of memories so they sit out. i can’t tell you specifically where each of them came from anymore, but i can tell that each one is meaningful and each one comes from our good planet earth.
anyone walking in our home knows this is true: i’m a vintage type. our home is not populated with new things fresh from the pottery barn catalog. instead, it is filled with things that are re-purposed, things that are old, things that have some history, things we haven’t replaced with new things. even our manner of work is kinda vintage, although this blog and our online product lines aren’t evidence of that. but as an acoustic-analog-type musician and a brush-to-the-canvas painter, we pretty much scream
“vintage”.
one of my most treasured physical memories of my poppo are a few old small wooden boxes we found next to his workbench. they would likely have been thrown away, but i knew he had “saved them” for some future purpose – perhaps holding random fasteners or nuts and bolts. we carefully wrapped them and brought them home and they now sit in our sunroom (next to our not-so-vintage-and-really-awesome nespresso machine) and they hold nespresso capsules (which are recycled) and a collection of old clothespins my sweet momma used to use on the old clothesline in our backyard growing up. it’s not the fancy stuff. it’s the vintage stuff.
i lusted over this typewriter in the antique store. i’m still thinking about it. if it’s still there one day when we are visiting that shop and i have a little bit of extra spending money, i will buy it. i’m not sure what i will do with it, but it speeeeeaks to me. my sweet momma loved typewriters too. what is it about those?? i think correctotype and purple carbon paper, the workout your fingers got, how it feels when you take the return handle to move to the next line down of type, and that really great sound -think of it…hear it- when you pull the paper out of the roll. it’s visceral.
the stove/oven in our kitchen is, ummm, old, and, although i prefer to think of it as ‘vintage’, it doesn’t necessarily count as romantic ‘vintage’. it was here when we bought the house in 1989 and had likely been here at least ten years at that point; the people who owned the house before us were not the buy-new or even fix-it-up type. matter of fact, they took it to a new level, putting contact paper on the countertops and backsplash and offering to teach us how to replace it. (eww. the sheer bacteria-breeding-ground-ness of that makes me shiver. one of the first things i did was remove that stuff.) but, back to the stove/oven. it continues to work and i can’t tell you how many meals i have cooked on it and how many people have eaten those meals. (if you merely consider almost 29 years and maybe just one meal a day, that is 10,585 times that this appliance has served me and my family and it is likely about 40 years old.) my sister has had multiple stoves/ovens in the time i have had this one. granted, she has enjoyed lots of updated features i haven’t had, but i haven’t (knock wood) spent anything to date on a stove/oven since 1989. amazing. it’s a testament to kenmore’s older appliances. someday i know we will have a new one, but in the meanwhile this workhorse is not taking up room in a dump somewhere, with a half-life of a billion years (ok, slight exaggeration) and i feel good about that. it’s not pretty, it’s not high-tech; i feel it has earned the label ‘vintage’ and no one seems to run – aghast- out of our kitchen because it graces the spot for ‘stove/oven’. there is something to be said for that.
we just had breakfast; d made it as he does each morning these days. he cooked it on that stove and it was deeeeelicous. and me? i’m going to get out our coin jar and count what’s in there. maybe there will be enough to go back to that antique shop so i can bring home this typewriter.
reverse threading 