State-by-State Home Improvement

At the Treasures & Trash Barn, Searsport, Maine. Photo by Jenna Schnuer.

Yeah, there are a few things here and there from places far, far away but, looking around my apartment, I realized that most of my art/knickknacks/stuff was hauled home in my carry-on, checked baggage or the trunk of a rental car from a trip to one of the 50. OK, I shipped the bear lamp home. This is some of it ...

Factory-second Fiesta disc pitcher. Bear-shaped lamp carved by a chainsaw artist and shipped home from the Anchorage Saturday Market. Four fur-trimmed tiny dolls (which are nowhere as creepy or, even, as doll-like as that sounds). Promotional clock made from a buzzsaw blade (and purchased on a hot Alabama day along the route of the World’s Longest Yardsale). Lunchbox with a horse painted on the side. Yarn. More yarn. Yarn made from dog hair (also not as creepy as it sounds). Paintings by a Michigan artist who usually creates carvings. Pottery made in Tennessee. Pottery made in Kentucky. A box of prescription slips written in the 1950s in Gadsden, Alabama. A wooden figurine of a door-to-door salesman (and purchased at a Chicagoland swap meet). Six tiny boxes made in India but purchased in my favorite store in all of Nashville. Four handmade flint marbles. An Ulu knife. A bought-in-Anchorage but made-in-China plane model that looks like the float plane I flew to my first fly-fishing experience. A cherry wood bowl. Vintage (no, just old) bluebird-shaped salt-and-pepper shakers (one with the, I think, original cork plug). A used lobster buoy from Deer Isle, Maine (need to return there soon). A mermaid-shaped hook to hang the lobster buoy. Six old glass soda bottles. One old glass milk bottle. A 1940s laundry cart (retired from laundry, now it holds books). A wooden bottle carved out of Hawaiian driftwood. A basket woven from Hawaiian grasses. A gourd-turned-flour scoop. Some magnets. A Rock City spoon rest. Bear bells.

If I had any sort of singing voice, I’d try to set it all to R.E.M.‘s It’s the End of the World as We Know It and post some audio. (It’s the end of good taste as you know it?) Lucky for you, I won’t pretend I do. And, no, I’m not as crazy or tacky as my stuff makes me sound. Somehow, it all works. Or so my friends tell me.

So, what have you hauled home from our 50?

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