Old and Rusted

My personal history with antiques started when I was really young. My mom always collected antiques, and my house growing up was a hodgepodge of her changing aesthetic. She has always been drawn to things that connect to her sense of home, and I have always been enamored with the stories that these pieces revealed. 

My mother came from Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania, a small town that always felt old to me. I went there often to visit my grandparents, and I remember it feeling like a magical wonderland so different from where I lived in Baltimore. 

My grandparent’s house, the house my grandfather built, felt like a place kept perfectly preserved in time, as though they decided to stop updating the house once the last of their children left in the early 1970s. As a kid, this house was heaven. My grandfather seemed to have a thing for closets - there were so many of them. And in all of these closets were so many treasures from my mother’s childhood. There were toys that she and my uncle had played with kept on shelves as if they had just been put away the day before: Tonka trucks, dolls, an amazing toy accordion that I adored, and the most exquisite cotton candy pink poodle that was my mothers when she was growing up, which I insisted sleeping with every time I came to visit. 

In addition to this treasure trove, my grandmother also had the most exceptional hat room I’ve ever seen. A room for hats! What a magnificent place to get lost in as a little girl. I can remember carefully lifting her hats out of the hat boxes that they had been so delicately placed in, removing the tissue paper just so, making sure to put them back exactly how I found them. There were hats for every occasion - celebration, mourning, the mundane, and I would imagine how she would wear them matched with the outfits hanging beneath plastic in the closets. 

As an only child, when I visited my grandparents, I had the luxury of choosing whichever room I wanted to sleep in and depending on how old I was, my choice of room changed with age. When I was young, I usually picked my mother’s old room, completely enamored with the idea of sleeping in the same bed that she slept in when she was a child. I used to imagine what she thought about when she lay under the same blankets as I did and felt a shared secret between us lying awake in that room.  

As I got older, I switched rooms often, sleeping in her siblings’ rooms, imagining different versions of their shared history in that house. My uncle’s room was decorated in masculine browns and oranges. My aunt’s room, a regal blue. His books that he read as a teenager still lining the shelves of his room. Her powder still sitting in a compact atop her dresser. Everything felt untouched, simply awaiting the discovery of a curious little girl. 

I loved going through the drawers of that house because every drawer unlocked some secret of the past. I would spend hours opening them, lifting the contents out, and then putting them back with as little disruption as possible, imagining the lives of my mother and her siblings when they were my age. 

My uncle’s room had a desk that faced the neighbor’s house, and I remember the day I discovered that his crayons were still in his desk drawers. There were  dulled pencils and notebook paper; ordinary things that were left exactly as they had been so many years prior to my discovery. I could go on forever about these artifacts that were kept so pristinely in my grandparents house, they are so locked in my memory. 

I know it was in that house, roving around from room to room, opening drawers and closets, clambering around my grandfather’s garage, that I began developing my love for old things. I was fascinated by the stories that my imagination created for everything I found, touched, smelled; they were probably half-truths of my mother’s childhood but were so wildly entertaining for an only child let loose for an afternoon. 

So, I guess like anyone else interested in antiques, I care about the story. Or at least the story that I imagine for the things that I bring home with me. Old and Rusted has come about from the fascination that I have had with the story of those things. It was an idea that I’ve had for awhile, mostly because it is something that I want for my part of the world, and that’s pretty simple: I want someone to tell me where to go to find the kinds of things that I love. 

I know a Google search can tell me where I can find antique stores; that’s easy. But Google can’t tell me if it’s my kind of antique store. Is it the kind of store filled with glass cases? Where you need to fetch someone every time you want to touch something? Or is it filled with rows of dusty shelves - porcelain ash trays situated next to old tools that are sitting on a shelf above a bowl of old matchbooks? Is it the kind of place that looks full of promise from the outside but is wildly disappointing when you get inside because the only thing you can afford is the antique bubblegum inside the dispenser that sits by the cash register? Does the store only carry antiques? Or do they also carry reproductions?

This is what I want, and to my knowledge, this kind of directory doesn’t exist for this little corner of the map. So, if this is something that you want as well, stick around. I’ll be doing my best to feature the antique stores local to Delaware and the surrounding area, in addition to updating you about the projects Matt and I are working on with First State Vintage. If you have ideas about where I should go next, drop us a line.