but the suggestion of one suffices. Converse is probably the most obvious about it, promising three chords and the truth with any pair of Chucks. Maybe people will wonder if you’re in a band. Even the ubiquitous restaurants with a fake clubhouse feel, whose pickers have found someone else’s grandfather’s bowling bag and fishing poles and displayed them to resonate, dampen the appetite.
Well, chances are, as the primary picker for your home, you learned a long time ago that best way to store sentiment is to display it. You have probably filled it with your own, authentic artifacts and tangible pieces of your life, and so you can with the things that clink, rattle, and dangle from your body. Say no to prefabricated rubbish, you have plenty of your own! You probably have pieces of your grandmother’s costume jewelry, gew gaws gathering dust in other porcelain gew gaws on your dresser, or a small drawer where your old watches, pendants and the odd abandoned earring go to rest. Got some wire and bag of jump rings for the occasional repair? You’ll find yourself wiring and clamping everything within reach. Honestly, when I found myself choosing a jump ring for a lamp finial I went to bed.
A friend with a beautiful and interesting home once had a terrific wall of black and white photos. When I expressed my envy of her collection, she looked surprised, and said, “You have them, too.” So sometimes these things happen as a result of some other rummaging, as seen with this tweed belt from Anthropologie, snatched up on the way to the register in the heat of a sale. The thing has been worn it with everything since, and now it has jumped on this straw hat for the very last crisp morning of spring.
This article appears in March 25 • 2011.