These Haunted Old Woodlands Beckon Me
This afternoon I've been antiquing here and there in this interesting old ballywick, in particular at an old Muskoka farmsite, with some of the few still active farmers in our burg. I love my enterprise. It's also true that it consumes me seven days a week with a hell of a lot of hours of hunting, refinishing, contemplating and negotiating....sometimes with my wife Suzanne, who has reservations about any more of anything getting into our modest home here at Birch Hollow. All winter we've been downsizing a large portion of our collection, simply because we have no place to store the old paintings, old chairs, old bottles, crocks and yes.....many, many books.
So once again I've arrived home here with a van load of creature comforts for us nostalgic folk. Son Andrew got a 1940's bicycle that he plans to use as an advertising sign for his vintage music business. He found some swell 78 RPM records and he chipped in and we bought mom some blue and yellow daisies right from the farmstead soil.....of course I'll have to dig her an appropriate garden with full sun. Suzanne claims we have too much shade to grow anything but jungle ferns.
I picked up some old tools, a rickety old ladder, some books, old ceramics, pitchers and vintage jewellry that should soften my partner, just enough to get some of these other more cumbersome antique items into the house.
When I started out in the antique and collectible business, it was pure recreation. I loved every moment I was out on the road looking for yard sales, estate clear-outs, hole-in-the-wall antique shops and most of all.....the country auction. I liked auctions so much I published an ongoing column called the "Auction Roll," for several years here in the local press. While admittedly I could get a little crazy at auction sales, blood pressure pulsing into a headache, I had the resolve to rebound from a lost bid to a winning bid. Today I have a patience problem and when an item I'm interested in finally comes up, well, I start sweating profusely and if no one sees my bids (cause I'm pretty good at the nod and wink), then my red face and uncontrolled chin fondling gives me up. And I've usually spent way more than I intended but that's what auctions are famous for....getting the tight wad to get mad at all those who wish to bid him up. That's me! You'd think a guy who used to write a column about auctions, and its protocol, would know when to quit advancing a bid. I don't. So I'm usually under close supervision, and within a sharp elbow's distance from a family member, willing to put me onto the ground if I pass the agreed limit determined prior to the start of bidding. Yup, it's that bad.
The antique and collectable industry has become a great deal more competitive for dealers today because there are more informed sale hosts, second hand shops, thrift shops, church bazaars and lawn sales. Even the auctions today are much more aggressively aimed at dealers and collectors, and it's next to impossible to purchase a job-lot these days, as items are sold one at a time, no matter how long it delays an auction. I loved those job-lots. I was at an auction that was on the verge of being rained out, and the auctioneer was putting ten and even twenty boxes of glasses, vases, kitchenware and vintage Christmas ornaments together for a couple dollar bid. We just bought a new van and it was the first major work-out, as we picked up about thirty boxes of nostalgia. Now getting a bargain is much tougher and the prices have quadrupled. You have to travel twice as far to get half as much, and with gas prices these days, it's getting pretty tough to run the business the same as we have for over twenty years.
So after getting home with whatever we've been able to stir up, at a half dozen sales and a few shop visits, I can't do one blessed thing beyond leashing our old hound Bosko, for a jaunt into the woodlands next door. I know there's a message here. Seek tranquility. Seek refuge from one's fetters. Escapism. But I adore antiquing. Yet I adore wandering these forest paths more.
As I have mentioned earlier in these collected blogs, my foray into the antique enterprise came at about the same time as I began my early explorations of the Muskoka hinterland; first as a treasure hunter, digging bottles from old homestead dumps. While I was out excavating a wide variety of sites, I would often stop for a brief hiatus, to make some notes in a small leather bound journal I kept in my backpack. From the first outings when most of the time was spent digging, to the final expeditions five years later, I was spending more time sitting on grassy knolls and rocky hillsides making notes, than sifting through the castoffs of yesteryear. I wrote thousands of pages detailing the particular woods I was visiting, and noting characteristics such as the windsong through the pinery, the sound of a myriad crystalline waterfalls along the course of the little creeks that criss-crossed the pastures.....the sounds of the birds in the branches overhead, the flights of squirrels leaping from bough to bough....the play of sunlight through the thick maple leaves on the hillsides, and the melancholy that permeated the abandoned homestead, as if the deceased were all watching me paint with words; speaking to me in so many ways about the life and times, the family, the victories and hardships, the births and deaths, the spirit of this place, or another, locked into a space between reality and memory.....imagination and truthful reconstruction of the cycles of life....in the giant ponder of "I wonder what it was like to live here back then."
While I wandered back to these haunted old homesteads thinking about the possibility of finding crockery soda bottles, old sealer jars, medicine bottles and china remnants, I never once participated in a dig that I wasn't acutely aware, and respectful of the site and the people that once dwelled here. I was always profoundly aware of the nature around me, and the eerie solitude at some sites,.... and the mysterious voices from thin air. There was outright good spirit at other locations bathed in full sunlight and refreshing breeze. I think about those times now as I stand here overlooking The Bog, feeling somewhat restored from a long day on the hustings, bumper to bumper traffic, sirens and horns, money spent, money earned.....and here I stand in this forgiving, natural place, where I have found solace once again.
I will probably never separate my passion for history from this mortal need to escape from all bustle, actual or perceived, and I'm not sure it will ever become an either-or. I'm sure my family finds it odd that I should require this escape to Thoreau's literary cabin, to escape all the excitement of a profession I confess.....I adore. I just adore this sanctuary a wee bit more.
Take a walk in the woods. What a rush. Now to return to the Walden Pond memoir, a book which I confess looks as if it has been run through a fanning mill.....but it's still quite readable.....I'd love a first edition but alas I shall never be that well off, as to afford such a luxury......suffice that this book meets the need and this forest meets all other requirements of any good day spent anywhere on this grand old earth.
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