Yet Another Journal

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» Monday, March 17, 2003
Spent a delightful hour on Friday wandering the Cobb Antique Mall next door to Office Depot where I’d gone on an errand, and was immersed in another world. This is a former furniture store that has been converted into rows of different little booths with commission sales at a central desk. The merchandise varied in quality and age. There were “antique books” I could find cheaper online that were from the 70s and not antique at all. There were fancy pieces of furniture--rococo, French provincial, other types with scroll work--that I wouldn’t have in my home on a bet they were so ugly and others that were so worn out that I couldn’t imagine anyone paying the price for them. Some of the old china cupboards were so aged the wood in them had split and cracked in the drawers, the latches had fallen off, you could see many layers of paint. But one could imagine when they were new and freshly painted and used by a brisk housewife in a bustling family kitchen.

It really “came home” to you walking around how times have changed. For instance, there was a large art-deco dressing table of the kind where the drawers are set very low, amber tortoiseshell finish, with a long, curved mirror in the center. The mirror was set at about 5'6", since most women were about that height in the past, and you could see all the way down to your feet. Yes, we have “full length” mirrors today, but this fancy, very feminine dresser made you think about the days when a lady always checked how she looked, head to toe, from the top of her smart hat to her polished pumps and the seams on her stockings. I could imagine June Allyson or Joan Crawford looking at herself in this mirror.

With most of the armoires there you wondered how a woman had room for her dresses with all those full skirts back then--perhaps some of them were mens’ armoires. But not one. It made the Wardrobe in Beauty and the Beast look like a doll’s trunk. It was a rounded art-deco type design and had a big central area, then two smaller “closets” on each side. It was massive, probably six or seven feet wide and eight feet high. We couldn’t have even have fit it through our bedroom door.

I also tried on some hats at a hat booth—I’ve never considered myself good looking in hats but about half of them were straw spring hats and I tried one after the other on in memory of those childhood days when I always got a new spring hat for Easter. They were pastel shades and held on with a rubber band under the chin. How I hated those nasty elastic bands that irritated the soft skin down there!

The other thing I noticed was all the old-fashioned kitchen storage. We’ve grown up for so many years with fitted kitchen cabinets and counters that it’s hard to remember the kitchen was once just another big bare room with one place set with a chimney vent for the cookstove and a freestanding sink. You put the icebox as close to the door as you could to keep from slopping the drip pan too much on the floor when you emptied it (no wonder lots of families kept their icebox on the porch!), then bought furniture like china cabinets or Welsh dressers to hold the dishes, a kitchen table and chairs (the table which would bear the brunt of food preparation, such as baking pies, kneading bread etc.), and what we’d call today a “workstation” for other food prep. They had several of the latter, the oldest in wood and more modern ones in enameled metal. They consisted of a hutch above filled with cabinet doors—several came with a door which hid a flour bin from which you could fill once, then sift flour for your baking from a hole in the bottom. Then a counter jutted out on which you could prepare vegetables, do smaller baking tasks and prep meat dishes, and finally there were more storage cupboards/drawers below. (Several had a bin for potatoes below.) I don’t know what the proper name for these pieces of furniture are, but several were labeled “housiers,” a term I’d never heard before. Again, you could just see a country mom or the family servant working at one of these.

It was a nice vacation from the present and yet reminded me how wonderful the inventions of today are...