Is shopping browsing or buying?

I love a good crafts fair. I love seeing the work of someone’s imagination and skill, and I also play a game of identifying the operative fad. Remember macramé? Dating myself back to my First Third, I remember going to the Greenwich Village Art Fair and the big thing was painting on velvet. (For some reason, the only mental pictures I have are matadors and Elvises on velvet.)

When I first moved to Anchorage, craft fairs meant crocheted toilet paper covers. I almost backed out of moving here because of them. But now I am the proud owner of Paul Dungan wine glasses with pottery stems, a hat from Tracy Anna Bader, and dozens of dolls from Marilee Dupree. And in the biggest treat I ever gave myself, I bought a complete set of dishes, service for ten, from a potter at the Girdwood Forest Fair about a dozen years ago. My room is decorated in all sorts of flying women or women with red hair, the products of crafts fairs across the country, fueling both my inspiration and aspirations.

I enjoy supporting the local artisans and crafters, but now that I’m in my Third Third and avoiding acquisition (with rules like “no new pottery enters the house until a piece leaves”), I only approach crafts fairs with single-minded missions. For years, I was looking for just the right butter dish. Then it was just the right lasagna pan. Then just the right teapot that could handle a big crowd of tea drinkers.

Years back, I had finally found the perfect butter dish, but the potter told me it wasn’t for sale. I think she used it to hold her business cards. I never found a butter dish that equaled it, so I kept using the plastic one that came with the refrigerator. Years later, a new employee started at work. Soon after, she brought me the butter dish. Apparently, the potter (a friend of hers) had always felt foolish not selling it to me and when my co-worker mentioned she was working with me, the potter insisted she deliver it.

An incredible benefit of living in small town Anchorage! I don’t even know how the potter knew who I was.





With all my missions finally accomplished, I’m left to roam the crafts fairs just looking. I don’t wear jewelry so I’ve always skipped those booths, but now I browse all the booths with thoughts like these: “Those wall hangings are gorgeous … but we don’t have any more room on our walls.” “Those tile trivets are clever … but do we really need another trivet?” “That pottery yarn ball holder is lovely … but it works just as easily to keep the yarn in a bag.”

This is not the right head set to browse a crafts fair! This is a bummer head set. I need to come up with a different approach, a way to appreciate without feeling like I’m being so relentlessly practical or stingy.

Oh, I still leave room for the hum, the sense that something is a perfect gift for someone or something that truly inspires. (There was the Snowball Fight in a Can – felted white balls sealed in a paint can – which was perfect for Sophie in California.) But mostly, I stick to consumables, as in food.

Even with food, there are the fads. One year, everything was acai berries. This year, it’s chaga, which is a giant, black, gross-looking mushroomy-type thing. And not even counting the chaga, tea is big. So big that tea is now getting the pottery rule in my house: “No more tea enters the house until more is drunk.” We’re going to be floating for quite a while.

But if I’m going to be drinking all that tea, I need more honey. And to cancel all that sweetness, I’m going to need more pickled garlic. How’s our supply of mustard?

Sounds like a mission to me.

A Room of My Own

For all the time we’ve lived in this house – 25+ years – my office has been a small room downstairs, off the laundry room. That’s where my drafting table, desk, and table sat. There’s a big window onto the back yard.

That’s where I wrote my newspaper columns, filed my papers, and scheduled radio recordings. That’s where I did calligraphy, kept my bookshelves, and stored my office and art supplies.

And every time I went down to it, I felt like I was walking down, down, down into a dungeon. Tim would turn the heat on early; didn’t help. It could be toasty down there, but it was still a dungeon. It was light and I had beautiful art on the walls, but it was still a dungeon.

When Sophie was five, we moved her to the neighboring guest room downstairs: a double-sized room with space for her “stations”: dress-up area, reading area, monkey bars across the ceiling. That made my downstairs dungeon a more pleasant place; I had company. I even set up the table in my room as her craft table to finish a project.

But it was still a dungeon. Eventually, a junk room. I’d just throw stuff in there because all I needed really was a little hole to get to the computer.

Five months ago, I decided Sophie-the-adult was no longer thinking of this place as home. So I moved in. I took over her desk, moved out her bed. Moved in my desk and drafting table – with no junk on them so they could actually be used for drawing and painting!

I even took Sophie’s tiny tea set collection in the display case and moved it piece by piece to my old room. I had to take photos of each shelf to make sure I placed them just so.

What I have now: three windows that look in three different directions; the computer, the printer, and the scanner all in the same room; a place to write and then casually walk over to the tables where I can paint.

I come down here when it’s dark, when the sun is shining, when it’s early, when it’s late. I come down here at three in the morning. I come down here because simply walking in the room stimulates my creative juices. I come down here when I have too many ideas upstairs and I have to start working on them … downstairs.

I am a conscientious shopper: I check Consumer Reports, I get references, I research and research. Except when buying a house: for that, the clincher is walking in the door and if it feels right and comfortable and welcoming, I know it’s right. Our house home is all that and more for me … except for that little room that was my office (but now which makes a perfectly pleasant guest room).

I love my new room! I love how it makes me feel. I can’t really empirically describe why, but it feels right and comfortable and welcoming. If in my Third Third I want to feel at home in my life and skin, then it’s only reasonable to feel at home in my room.

Best advice I ever got:

A hum is when your decision feels just right, when the choice you’re making matches with the whole universe. It’s a hum through your whole being.

A snag, on the other hand, is a kink. A stumble. A rough spot in the smoothness. You can try to ignore snags, try to pretend you didn’t notice them, but really, you KNOW. You know it’s not right. Period. A wise person taught me to listen to my hums and snags when making choices. They don’t lie.

My new room is a hum. My old room was a snag I should have listened to years ago.

The Third Third is a time to act on old, lingering snags and find the hum.