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collecting things is fun and fills your home with happy memories. make your home tell your story. make it feel like you. so when people come they leave knowing you better, just from being in your home. the corks are as much a game as they are a collection. you know how everybody always sits at the kitchen counter? "toss the cork" gives them something to do aside from eat all of the pistachios. they also nicely fill that awkward space where wall meets cabinet. and now i'm singing this. but anyway...this is like 10 years worth of corks. just so ya know. ahem...and stop looking at our ugly cabinets.  i spent many summer days collecting sea glass on a tiny island off the coast of marblehead, massachusetts. i was a nanny for two boys who changed my life. their family taught me about peaceful parenting, doing what you love for a living, and living happily ever after. standing at my kitchen sink seeing this sea glass every day reminds me why we do what we do and that we are not alone in this.  we found those shells on trips that we took with people we love. some are from a tiny island off the coast of nicaragua. others are from a tiny island off the coast of honduras. they make me dream about what tiny island we will visit next. they fill me with calm and peace in the middle of doing dishes.  cole went on a school trip to charleston when he was just a little guy. we gave him moolah to spend in the market there. he spent every single dime of it on that little sweetgrass basket for me. it's one of the very few things i would grab if the house was on fire. it's filled with sand dollars collected by dear friends on yet another tiny island. the two magnificent shells were brought back from africa from one of our best friends. tim collects the tabs from the tops of cans for his dad. we are not really sure what his dad does with them, but they make him happy. and there is no story behind the bottle caps 'cept that i had that mason jar.  stones from a mountain stream in north carolina and smurfs from tim's childhood. his mom saved them. now they are in camden's room. when our niece, maggie, comes to visit, we get out the blocks from the cole and camden's childhood and the smurfs from tim's childhood and make little houses for them. sometimes i find smurfs tucked in the cracks of that tree stump we call a coffee table in the family room days after she leaves.  these things make us happy.
collect things that make YOU happy. it doesn't have to cost a thing. just make it meaningful. and make it fun. a big bowl full of dominoes, legos, or jenga pieces on the coffee table is not boring. a big bowl full of those decorator balls is boring. know what i mean? of course you do. Comments are closed.
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