Collections and Other Stuff I Like

In our workroom window in Northampton we had a small collection of fairies. Since no place seemed right for them here, I decided to divide them up by seasons. Here are the two that landed on the Fall tree.

The first one, with her sunflower dress and missing wing fabric that basically dissolved, was a parting gift from my co-workers at Child Care Focus. The second one was a pleasant surprise when I started unwrapping the fairies. I didn’t remember him at all so I don’t remember where I got him. Other fairies will show up on the Christmas tree and the Spring tree .

Several years ago at a Deerfield craft fair I bought an ornament with an old fashioned slightly weird photograph which inspired this year’s treats. I searched online for vintage creepy photographs and found one of two girls with a ghostly third girl between them. I was excited to find chocolate ghosts and skeletons at World Market since I imagine that the recipients prefer chocolate ghosts to marshmallow ghosts. Happy Halloween!

It was windy on Saturday night so Sunday was a good day to look for a fallen branch along the lakefront bike trail.

We hung it in the living room window and while we couldn’t fit everything on it, we could add a beautiful glass pomegranate with seeds I don’t even remember buying and the new wooden leaf I got from Target a few weeks ago.

While some of the Day of the Dead ornaments are hanging on the branch due to size and fragility, others are on the dining room Halloween trees I put up at the beginning of October.

A few new ornaments are hanging on these as well. We bought the new pipe cleaner pumpkin man and the pumpkin cupcake ornament at the Evanston sidewalk sales. The witch’s broom was tied to the top of a bar of soap with an image of a witch driving a car. When I saw it at Home Goods I thought it would be perfect for one of the trees and was a free bonus since we also got a bar of soap!

We bought this Eeek ornament when we went to Columbia, Missouri for a music festival in September.

The weirdest thing about our new Chicago condo is that the two bathrooms are almost exactly the same. The only difference is that the one off the bedroom has a closet and is a little bigger. Otherwise they were exactly the same – same green tiles on the floor, same glass door tub enclosure and the same white tiles with a green diamond border, same small white sink cabinet, same green counter top, same large medicine chest, same “Hollywood make up lights”, and the same porcelain toilet paper holders, hooks, and towel bars (both of which had obviously fallen down at least once and broken a bit since they were hung too close to the toilet and people couldn’t help using them as if they were handicap bars).

The green worked well as a mermaid bathroom but wouldn’t work as the base for a sun bathroom so while most of the mermaids went to the bedroom bathroom, a few ended up in the living room bathroom. “It’s kind of “Mermaid Lite” in here,” my sister commented.

I really didn’t want the two bathrooms to be exactly the same, though so I was glad when the wall with the medicine chest had to come down for some plumbing work. I mean, who needs a medicine chest in their guest bathroom anyway? We hung the mirror from our old guest bathroom which is primarily blue and green above the sink and decided that this bathroom’s colors would be blue and green. I was pleased that the diamond tiles of the mirror went nicely with the diamond tiles in the shower. And I ordered some knobs for the cabinet that were blue and green and kind of a diamond shape. Then I looked at those empty walls! I thought of the pottery bird picture that had hung in our kitchen but had no place here in Chicago. I also placed a small glass box with a bird on the top on the glass shelf we had hung under the mirror. Then I put a new cast iron feather I purchased at a sidewalk sale this summer on top of the toilet.

I then announced that three bird things were enough and that this wasn’t going to become a bird bathroom – that there was no need for the walls to be filled with birds. But that one bird hanging on one side of the door did look kind of lonely so when we went to an arts festival and saw another similar sized bird of course we bought him for the other wall. But we don’t need to fill all these walls with birds, I told myself again.

In his essay on his show “Chicago We Own It” at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art”, William Swislow writes that “Horror Vacui” a term that means fear of empty spaces is a defining characteristic of many Chicago collectors. Aha! Now I just need to know the word for what makes me want to put all the bird things together. For even after declaring “no more birds in the bathroom”, I remembered that my sister had given me a green and blue plate with a bird image which obviously belongs with the others.

As I mentioned in a footnote to the last post Bruce Handy, author of “Wild Things” finds Anne Shirley “detestable”. He says he tried to read “Anne of Green Gables” but the deal breaker was when Anne named a geranium. As evidence for his inability to continue he quotes Anne in a paragraph that begins, “How do you know but that it hurts a geranium’s feelings just to be called geranium and nothing else?” Little does he know that this paragraph could be a litmus test for determining if a reader is of the “race that knows Joseph” – one of Anne’s kindred spirits. (1)

I have read and reread the five Anne books that belonged to my mother and was truly baffled at his dislike until my friend Susan explained that there are some books you have to read for the first time at a certain (young) age to appreciate them.

This made me remember my “Pride and Prejudice” experience. I have read so many books I’ve enjoyed that are inspired by, based on, or include characters who positively worship Jane Austen. Since I had never read her I thought I should and while I did finish “Pride and Prejudice” I really didn’t enjoy it and thought Mr. Darcy who others apparently find the ideal mate as detestable as Bruce Handy found Anne.

And in Bruce Handy’s defense I must add another thought. My mother also had a copy of “Rilla of Ingleside” which I had read once and decided to reread recently rather than rereading the Anne books. When I was perplexed by something in the book, I googled it and found to my surprise that “Rilla of Ingleside” is sometimes referred to as the eighth Anne book and that there are two more: “Anne of Ingleside” (the sixth) and “Rainbow Valley” (the seventh). So I found a used copy of one and downloaded the other onto my Kindle and I must admit I never would have been able to finish them if I wasn’t already a “member of the Anne cult”.

(1) As long as I’m writing about Bruce Handy, I’ll include another footnote. During my latest foray into Anne world I wondered about the derivation of the phrase “the race that knows Joseph”. Googling it only gives results related to the Anne books and no definitive answer to the source of the phrase.

There was a telephone

And a red balloon

And a picture of

The cow jumping over the moon

According to Bruce Handy in a (mostly) excellent book “Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult” to Margaret Wise Brown, “the very act of cataloguing a room held private meaning” as she once told a friend that she would combat depression every morning by looking around her apartment and making a note of the various things that gave her pleasure.

As any reader of this blog subtitled “collecting, observing, and cataloguing my world” will note, I most certainly do the same thing and while I hadn’t consciously realized it was to “combat depression” that does make sense.

Bruce Handy doesn’t directly credit the source of this fact as that isn’t how he uses footnotes. (1) But since I’ve read the excellent biography “Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon” by Leonard S. Marcus and don’t remember it, I think it must have come from the newer biography, “In the Great Green Room: the Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown” by Amy Gary. I hadn’t heard of this newer biography but can’t wait to read it.

(1) Bruce Handy uses footnotes to add information as he does on page 206 to explain why he hasn’t included “Anne of Green Gables” in his chapter “Going on Seventeen (Or Not)” and calls Anne a “sunny, cheerful, detestable orphan”.

The good news about the peacock collection is that since my dresser can fit in the bedroom here the peacock mirror hangs in its proper place.

On the right side of dresser is the glass vase from my younger daughter that kind of looks like a mermaid tail and a peacock tail at the same time (perfect!), a little pouch with a beaded peacock from friend Jen, and a decorative plate from my parents.

On the left side there are two peacock frames. One from my younger daughter with a picture of my father looking like he did during my childhood and one I just bought at Target with a picture of my mother from the same time period.

The frame my mother’s picture had been in had broken and I was on the lookout for a new one. When I first saw this one I really wasn’t sure about it I visited it at Target three or four times before I bought it but now I think it’s perfect.

Some other peacocks appear on the other side of the bedroom. Another peacock plate – this one from my older daughter sits on my husband’s bedside table.

One of the peacock screens hangs above mine.

The perfume bottle from Austin sits above the bed again.

Some of the other peacocks are in the work room/guest room along with irises and some of the mermaids.

Some actual peacock feathers fill in an awkward space as the cross stiched iris picture is hanging on a nail that was already there. To the right you can see the pipe cleaner peacock we bought at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore and a peacock paperweight from my sister.

I made these two “batik” prints many years ago by drawing with crayons on hot tinfoil and then lifting the image with tissue paper.

These two framed pictures are sitting on top of the children’s books bookshelf for now. The papercut on the left is from friend Jean. Our older daughter traced the tattoo that is another allusion to the similarity of the mermaid and peacock tails.

The bad news about the peacock collection is that the peacock fans have not found a space. Sometimes I think I may hang them in and among the clothes in the walk in closet and sometimes I think that is ridiculous and that I should let them go.

This morning I was sitting in bed reading and looking up every once in a while and thinking about how happy it makes me that my dresser fits in my new bedroom and that my peacock feather mirror is hanging above it here like it is supposed to. In our last bedroom the dresser didn’t fit and the only place the mirror could go was behind the door. I was thinking about the next post I was planning to write, “The Status of the Peacocks” but I was also thinking about a news item mentioning that Lisa Minnelli was “Mariekondoizing” and selling all her stuff. I wondered how this Marie Kondo could make someone want to get rid of all their stuff. So I went to Wikipedia and found out the process is actually called the KonMari method and consists of “gathering together all of one’s belongings, one category at a time, and then keeping only those things that spark joy (in Japanese tokimeku) and choosing a place for everything from then on.”

Since almost all of my decorative categories’ belongings spark joy, I brought them all to Chicago and have been choosing and documenting the places I found for them. I think I am going to have to look at some other category (perhaps clothing) if I want to do any “mariekondoizing”.

Update: It turns out Marie Kondo actually suggests starting with clothing.