Henry David Thoreau (one of my all-time favorite authors ever) wrote in Walden, “Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly…I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved…Well, there might I live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer, and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in… An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard woodlot and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
Yes! I love this quote so much! Tony and I do this in every quaint town we explore…what would it be like to live here? With every old abandoned building we see…we could do this and this and live upstairs and have a shop downstairs.
I realized that now we do it with any unusual antique we find. Just last month, while shopping at the Springfield Antique Show and Flea Market, we imagined buying an unusual piece. Picture this: a 1960’s-1970’s fake fireplace mantle with laminate faux marble, a built-in pull down bar on the left side, a pull down record player and 8-track player on the right side, both with red velvet backing. A fake fireplace log that lit up and made crackling sounds was also part of the deal. We loved it! We imagined it in the new addition to the shop; we dreamed of standing by it enjoying cocktails (I was in a swanky polyester dress) while Dean-o played from the record player. It was big and heavy and unusual, and we figured that we would be the new forever owners if we brought it home because it would not be a super-desired item in our area. So, we let it lie. We enjoyed it in our imaginations and then let it alone. We call these our Thoreau-ish moments.
