Thursday, November 18

Found


Yesterday, I bought some industrial shelves from a woman who runs a sewing and miscellany shop. She had posted them on Craigslist, which I've loved for the past year because it is affordable and eliminates the more mysterious aspects of a market economy. I've found most of the sellers I've dealt with to be kind and interested in someone using their discarded items that they themselves have no further use for. I suppose that plays off of my own sentimentality: that even things discarded are carefully passed on to another specific user instead of thrown out or anonymously donated.
The shelves are great, a much-needed addition to our cluttered workspace. It was somehow comforting to know that they came from a similar situation: of being filled with fabric, old vintage items, miscellany. The woman who sold them to us showed us a wooden box of cards she had found. She had not seen them in a long time, hidden somewhere on the shelves before their dis-assembly. She was collecting playing cards she found on the street, in the hopes that one day she would have a full deck. It was a curious exercise in ordering the chaotic, and also putting faith in the random. It's beautiful to think that the found cards would not all be the same, that there was an entire deck of mismatched cards laying on streets, waiting for someone to bring them together. Like all curated collections, the order may come from the collector. It is sometimes their role to find the meaning in the accumulation.
After we had loaded up and paid, she said very seriously: "Now remember, take time to set up your shelves and organize. It's very important to do that."