And another thing…

I was never a big collector of things until we started talking about buying a house. I mean, I lived in an apartment. There wasn’t a whole lot of room to have a bunch of kitsch. Plus, you know, it’s more crap to dust…if one was inclined to do that sort of thing.

However, once we decided to buy a house, we started collecting. Dennis had been a beer can collector for many years. This must be a guy thing. My opinion is that empty cans should be immediately discarded. Having said that, I do have some cool vintage cans as decoration in the kitchen….ah, the allure of the 50 year old lard can!

I had decided before we even started looking at houses, that I wanted a yellow kitchen. So, I started collecting yellow enamelware. Lots of it…pots, pans, utensils, buckets, lunchboxes, just about anything with that buttermilky color. Most of it is in a box in the basement.

At another point, we started picking up green and white transferware. Plates, platters, covered casseroles. Most of it is in a box in the basement.

Somewhere along the line, I got interested in bone dishes…most of those, yep, in the basement.

There have been other transient interests - Vaccum coffee pots, Frankoma pottery, Roseville jardiniere planters, feedsack quilts and fabric, vintage thimbles, old Kodak folding cameras, etc., etc. We get really good at walking antique malls doing the ‘quick scan’, zeroing in on our objects of interest. We are power-antiquers. We are sprinters, not marathoners. Scan, scan, pick up, put back, scan.

We never purchase gobs of anything, just enough to wet our whistle and then we move on to something new.

Well, we’ve moved on to something new.

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