There is an amazing antiques mall in Canandaigua. I love to just wander around, exploring the eclectic collection of furniture, china, toys and ephemera from years past. I love to run my fingers along the worn surface of an oak buffet, imagining the generations of women who have spread sumptuous holiday meals, painstakingly arranged floral pieces and delicately embroidered runners across that same surface. I am forever intrigued by the old watch maker's benches, the secretary style desks, and the long-outdated wooden card catalogs with their abundant drawers, cubbyholes and elegant handles. My mind seems to immediately flow with ideas of all the wonderful things that could be so neatly tucked away in them, orderly, organized and elegant.
Of course, I must admit there are a few less "warm fuzzy" reasons for my penchant to stick to the edges of the store. For all that we tend to associate the Victorian Era with wholesomeness, properness and vignettes of devoted families, there was a morbid and macabre underside to all that gilded charm.
I cannot even begin to describe my horror at turning a corner and finding the most disturbing lamps I have ever seen. [Reader discretion advised] Bald headed baby dolls, naked and hacked off at the waist, shoved into a cage-like wire frame with heavy tin oil-lamp based screwed on where their legs should have been. They stared blindly forward like shell shocked and tormented inmates of a child's asylum run by a madman. I didn't take pictures because I didn't want such nasty images here, but I swear I'm not making it up.
On a more positive note, I did discover an entirely new subject to read about (if I ever make it through the stack of books I've already got) - trench art. Who knew that bored WWI soldiers carved, molded and welded their empty cartridge shells, bullet canisters and scraps of wood or bone into pieces of art? Seriously, why didn't we learn about this stuff in history classes? It would have been so much easier to be engaged and paying attention if we'd had something innately human and personal like that to which we could connect the broad sweeping overview of events and famous people of the times that we were supposed to be grasping!
But it is late and I begin to rant, so I shall end here. Except to say that if you need somewhere to spend a rainy afternoon, the main corridors of your local antique store beckon cheerfully. And should you ever plan to run a haunted house, gather your courage and explore the many splendid props tucked quietly away in the narrower, lonelier aisles...
