The World According To Anne Arky

As I mentioned, I spent weeks agonizing over what I was going to do with all this furniture and stuff explosion that was coming my way, and Melanie and I worked diligently to arrange and rearrange things to make it happen. Fortunately I had measured everything that I knew was coming to my house before I left Virginia, so we didn’t have to estimate, we could actually make specific plans, although at times Melanie swore my measurements were bound to be off and this was never going to work. It did – everything fit just where I planned for it to be. There were two items that I hadn’t figured out what I would do with, and as we speak, they are in my garage waiting for placement. Neither of them is anything I care to part with, as one is a child’s homework desk that was given to me by a neighbor when I was about six years old, and I’m as sentimental as a homemade Valentine. If someone gives me something, I’m apt to still have it some thirty to fifty years later, just based on the fact that so-and-so gave it to me. (This, of course, all depends on just exactly who gave it to me – I’ve cheerfully tossed almost every piece of anything Mike ever gave me unless I was attached to it in spite of him – but never because of him – and likewise a few other people’s stuff goes the same way, but you get the idea.) The other item awaiting placement is a bookcase my father and mother built, which sure as heck isn’t going anywhere outside of my possession.

Among the things that arrived at my house in this exercise was the rest of my dish collection. I have four sets of antique dishes that I actively collect, and one of them is the same set that Mother bought in the 1960s. My collection started out as my buying replacement items for her, and ultimately she told me to stop buying her any more, but not before I had stumbled across a couple of huge piles of it, so I just started collecting it myself. Mind you, I have a china cabinet that I bought soon after buying my house, but it’s filled to the brim and beyond with the main set that I collect, so a couple of years ago I bought a barrister’s bookcase for some other dishes, which sits beside the china cabinet. I figured when the rest of my dishes arrived, I needed to have a place to put them, so lo and behold, I found not one, but two barrister bookcases for sale on Craig’s List for the same price I had paid for my original one, so I arranged to buy both of them, figuring that while I really only need one right now, having a “spare” would not be a bad idea because sure as shit, in a year or so I’ll need another one and wish I had gotten it. So I did. The beauty of using barrister bookcases is that just like a glass-fronted china cabinet, the stuff you put in them doesn’t have to be dusted, and believe me, I have a lot of stuff that I want not to have to dust.

During this move, when we needed padding for furniture, I managed to accumulate – and was then forced to wash – enough sheets to outfit a KKK rally, so long as it was sponsored by Martha Stewart, because they were all sheets with prints and not solid white. Unfortunately, except for the ones I took off my own bed to wash with the rest of them, I really didn’t have any that I cared to put on the new bed downstairs, so this meant that I had to go buy some new sheets for the “new” (but quite an antique, actually) bed at my house.

Last weekend, I was going out with Tami to visit our friends for dinner, and I was telling her that these friends were taking me the next day to get the barrister bookcases (they often get drafted for my wild furniture chases, owing to their having a truck and a great disposition about it). I also mentioned that even though I’m oversheeted to within an inch of my life, I planned to go this week to get a set for the new bed. Later, her car radio jolted to life to remind her that she had merely turned it down and not off, and when I asked her if she’d heard that faint noise, she said, “What noise?” I blinked and said, “You know – the voices I’m hearing that say, ‘Buy more furniture! Buy more sheets!’”

P.S. Got the sheets, got the bookcases. What next?