09 June 2017

poking around the upper west side flea.


it happens like this: a certain notion takes flight in my heart, and i go seeking, seeking, seeking until it's manifested in full. it's always something, and lately it's a floral painting and the way light might look streaming through an amber glass bottle perched in our window.

i've searched high and low for months, popping in and out of thrift shops, wandering brooklyn flea, sifting through etsy pages. a few days back, we were on our way to the met for a sunday wander when the sunshine winked and our plans suddenly seemed insufficient. in a spring where we are perpetually running between rain clouds, how could we possibly while away a bright afternoon indoors? and so coffees from tarallucci and a poke around the neighborhood flea market it was. we rummaged through dusty books and dainty porcelain, vintage toys and victorian hat boxes. tent after tent we wandered, and made our quiet discoveries: a floral painting in a gilded frame tucked behind a stack of cookbooks -- a small iron moose head for hanging dishtowels in the kitchen -- a man who digs treasures for a living, can tell you the history of new york by way of canons and tricornes and handblown glass bottles (medicinal, herb, poison) found buried and layered and married with the soil.

and that is the story of how it came to pass that i marched home on a sunny-turned-drizzly-on-a-dime day in june with an 1886 amber whiskey bottle dug from the depths of new york city and a 1930s floral painting that once bedecked a house in connecticut before being bought at an estate sale before being bought at the upper west side flea before gracing the westward wall of our treehouse.

No comments:

Post a Comment