Reflections 30: Collections

Did you have collections growing up? What initially sparked your interest in it.

I had lots of collections growing up--for some reason, it is the drive of most kids to hoard everything. Usually crap stuff, but never-the-less.

When I was pretty small, I found a small pink stone in my front yard. It had probably fallen off someone's jewelry or backpack or something, but I was amazed--it was so smooth and beautiful. After that, I started collecting rocks. I found lots of neat ones--usually ones that had things that had been petrified, like snail shells and things. Of course, I thought they were dinosaur fossils and that if I kept digging, we would find an entire dinosaur's remains beneath our house.

As a weird aside, since I don't know if another chance will come up to talk about it (and I don't want to forget): there was, in any yard I visited, moss growing on the ground somewhere. At the church, at home, at my grandparent's house...there was always that little soft patch of downy moss if you looked hard enough, usually in the dark near the side of the house. I can't remember exactly where the story started--either Amber or I made the story up, as we were forever trying to entertain one another--but we became convinced that the moss was what had happened to the dinosaurs....that their world and vegetation had been shrunk down to so tiny, we could barely even see them, to make way for our world. So I would carefully remove the moss all the way down to the roots and carry it around, wondering what the dinosaurs were doing on their tiny little mobile world.

Back to my collections though!

At some point, my Great Grandmother bought me a black stuffed bull. I fell in love with the thing, even though I eventually lost it (like I lose everything), but Grandma noticed and remembered, and started buying me porcelain cow creamers.

I can't believe I actually found a picture of one I had...

Any ways, I LOVED these creamers--they were beautifully painted and so charming...Of course, each and every one of them had a name.

When we were packing up to move all our things, I carefully wrapped each one in a shirt of mine, then in newspaper and packed the rest of the box with newspaper. Unfortunately, that did not save the poor cows from being totally obliterated when my brother tripped and fell on the box :(

My heart was so broken that I didn't start the collection again until my mother bought me a cow-dolier this past summer. He is fantastic and his name is Luca =)

Other than that, I did a brief stamp thing--the post office had a club for kid stamp collectors, and if you signed up you got a nifty catalog of different types of stamps in the mail, which was chock full of cool cartoon characters and things to read about collecting stamps, and puzzle games. It was awesome.

Finally, most recently I have started collecting books. I have always loved books, but never really sought them out--I let them come to me. My favorite authors now are the firsts to be collected, which means that I am working on my Jude Deveraux collection.

I'm pretty sure that just about covers it for collections, but I will record more if I think of anything!

~Andie!~