Little Things I Love

I'm a fairly low-maintenance person and have been pretty much since I got married and especially since I became a mom. I "suffer" from the typical ills of being a full-time mom, which means that I haven't had a haircut in well over 6 months, my shoes are not fashionable but "comfortable", and my daily uniform consists of jeans and whatever shirt is clean and can be used to wipe a runny nose if need be. Oh, and what is the deal with getting acne in my 30s?? ME is an area of me that I really need to work on. But that's another story.

Every other week or so, I get away by myself for a few hours. I usually don't venture too far from home. There is thankfully and gratefully an antiques mall less than 10 minutes from here, so I go there a lot. A LOT. I don't buy something every time I go, but I have to say that it is my favorite place to spend my free time. I would rather go there than go shopping for clothes or make-up any day.

I love the look and feel of old, vintage, retro, antique junk. It is a love that began when I was in elementary school. Our babysitters lived in an old Victorian house with a wrap-around porch. It was filled with antiques and their sitting room, in particular, stunned me. It is because of that sitting room that I knew that one day I would have to have a church pew in my own home. Not only that, but my maternal grandmother has always been a collector of Korean antiques. And Korea being as old as it is, the antiques are OLD. Really old. There is a neighborhood in Seoul that is my favorite place to visit. It is made up of nothing but art galleries and antiques shops. Anyway, so my mom inherited a love of old things from her mom and I guess I caught the bug, too.

When I was a kid, in addition to piano lessons, there was a time when I took organ lessons as well. My mom had acquired a vintage organ that sat in one of our living rooms and decided that I needed to learn the lost art of the organ. She always talked about buying a harpsichord, but I don't think we had the space. You get the point.

Anyway, I go out from time to time and buy little vintage tchotchkes. They might be from an antiques shop or mall, a yard sale, or a thrift store. I'm not picky. I don't have the space in my home for the large pieces that I really want and covet, so I settle for the little things that some people might think are garbage. Oh, and I also like the idea that these cast-aside things are being recycled. I kind of wish that there was a junkyard nearby because I'd probably go and camp-out there on the weekends.

One more thing -- the smell. I absolutely love the smell of must and dust in antiques shops and antiquarian booksellers. It's the smell of age and history.

Anyway, so to explain these photos... I framed a postcard from 1910 that I bought a while back. I liked the colors and what it says: "May each return of this glad day/ More blest by fortune find you/ And set you on a fairer way/ Than that which lies behind you." I'm still trying to figure out a place on a wall to hang it, so until then it's sitting atop an antique Korean chest that my mom had shipped over here years and years ago. In the second photo is today's $1 find, which is the brass apple bell. It has a nice, soothing sound when you ring it and I knew I had to have it.

So there you have it. I'm a frumpy old bag lady trapped in the body of a 35-year old Korean-American mother of three.