I completed a little project yesterday and now I find myself looking at it each time I walk into the kitchen. I’ve collected coffee cups for years and I’ve had them stored on top of my kitchen cabinets. I can sort of see most of them, especially if I stand on my tip toes at the edge of the dining room. However, that isn’t very satisfying, so during Thanksgiving break I bought an unfinished wooden shelf. It’s a rather interesting little contraption with a removable panel for decoration or photos and it has four knobs for hanging stuff. I’ve slowly painted it blue with a green panel. Then I put a panoramic photo of the garden on the panel.
Now I have it hanging on the wall, along with four of my favorite garden photos. It’s the new home for eight of my favorite cups, and it just makes me smile! Three of the cups belonged to Mom, one was a gift from a friend, another was an “unfinished” ceramic that I painted, another was collected on a trip with Gary. There is a cup I just bought at Big Lots because I liked it and there is one that is a mystery. I love it, but I can’t for the life of me remember where it came from!
My home is filled with things that make me smile. Some people would call it clutter. Others would say I need some serious therapy! I have a pitcher in my office that is incredibly ugly. I know it’s ugly. I’ve always thought it was ugly. But it belonged to my mother and she liked it. I don’t know where it came from or why she had it in her kitchen, but it makes me smile when I see it because I can “see” it in her kitchen. It’s the memory that it holds that gives it value.
My daughter has a scrapbook layout in the January/February issue of Simple Scrapbooks. It’s about my paternal grandmother’s perfume bottle collection, and specifically a little rocking horse bottle. Funny, but I don’t even remember the horse! I do, however, remember a little pyramid bottle that separated into three parts: top was perfume, middle was cologne, and bottom was crème. I loved that bottle and I thought the idea was fascinating. I remember taking it apart at least a dozen times. I never used the perfume, I just wanted to play with the bottle! I hadn’t thought about the bottle in years, but when I saw Kat’s layout I remembered so many details of Gran’s dresser. I guess that’s part of the appeal of scrapbooking or scrapping (I never can remember the terms).
The same magazine page shows an old Underwood typewriter belonging to someone’s grandfather. That made me smile, too, because I have a very similar one sitting in my closet that belonged first to my maternal grandmother, and then to Mom. It’s a heavy, awkward thing that I seldom look at, but it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Someday I may have a place to display it along with some of their writing.
I love those decorating shows where the team comes in and makes a big “Oh, good grief look at this mess!” face and then completely changes everything. But that’s television. In reality I like my mess. I like the clutter around me. I like my sentimental collections and obsessions. They make me smile…J
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