Daily writing prompt

Do you have any collections?

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I’m sitting in my living room with this prompt and scanning the house to see if there’s something obvious I’m missing out on. Collections. I think the answer is no, I’ve none. Besides the obvious, books. But that’s not really a collection. I don’t go searching for books to put on shelves just to collect them. I buy books that I want to read and hopefully learn something from and then I don’t want to part with them so I shelve them.

I do like antiquey things. Old metal skeleton keys. I have a basic black rotary phone. Old dishes, teacups. Norman Rockwell anything. But not any one specific thing, the way some people collect bobble heads or salt and pepper shakers. That’s too much commitment for me I think. I prefer scattered, than narrowed. The old dishes I buy, we use and eat off of or drink from. I like knowing that a plate had a previous owner, a previous life in a previous cupboard.

They’re not for looks or to put in the china cabinet. They’re for utilizing. And so my cupboard houses two stacks of plates, mine and his. He came with these god awful plain white “corel” dishes that I despise. My stack of plates are mismatched and mostly second hand. (There is one in there from Anthropologie that I couldn’t walk away from).

As far as coffee mugs go, I hate to admit it but I am mostly impartial to mugs from Starbucks. They are so beautiful. I have two faves right now for drinking coffee, and they are from opposite ends of the spectrum. One is a Starbucks mug my daughter bought me and the other is a homemade mug given to me as a Christmas gift from my step-daughter and she purchased it at a craft sale, it’s perfectly imperfect.

Other than that, my mind collects too many thoughts and worries. If I could include ruminating as part of collecting then I collect old memories both good and bad, and feelings of guilt both past and present. These are not fun collections and I’m trying to let that $hit go.