Last year, when my great-grandmother died, I was left with a picnic basket filled with her shawls, crochet needles, and some yarn. It may not sound like a lot, but very little has ever meant as much to me as that basket. I have an affinity for old things, and not only was this old, it was personal.
Old things are beautiful to me. There's an antique shop in my town and it's stuffed wall-to-wall with memories that don't belong to me. I never experienced these things in their day, which is an especially wonderful feeling, because then I get to imagine them for myself. When I hold a frayed book in my hands, I wonder who was the first person to hold it. The faded quilts in the corner once covered someone's bed, and I wonder who got to roll up in them for warmth. My favorite part of the store is a basket of black and white and sepia photographs. I look at the dark eyes of these strangers and wonder what they were thinking when the photo was taken.
As a writer, old things give me a lot of freedom. If you've ever read Ransom Riggs's, "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children," you know what I'm talking about. Riggs spent years procuring thousands of old photographs from private collectors and put them in his own sequence in order to make a story of his own. When I first read this book a few years ago, I was mesmerized. By that point I knew how desperately I wanted to write for the rest of my life, and here was a man who was putting an entirely new spin on my passion. I bought my first old photographs shortly after, quickly followed by old boxes and records and books.
Imagination is everything for me. When I was a kid, I would imagine myself into new worlds, as a princess or a knight or an animal. As I got older, my imagination manifested as writing, and I would write myself or others into new stories. And now, old things give me a new outlet for my creativity.
Ironically, I am in an excellent time in history to love the old. The latest trends are old trends. Polaroid pictures, '80s music, record players and grunge styles are all the rage. There's a craze within my generation in loving what is old. I can't complain. I'm right there with them. There's a demand for older things right now, which means I'm able to get my hands on antiques much more easily.
On special occasions I like to hold my grandmother's old shawls and imagine her attending dinners with them wrapped around her shoulders, or crocheting a scarf for my grandfather with those old needles. They aren't my memories, but I still love them. The memories in my photographs aren't mine either, but I can't help but make them mine as stories form in my head. Who knows? Maybe I'll write a book of my own.
