Confessions of a junk collector

I first headed down a life of hoarding….um…collecting…when I was 3 years old. I started out first collecting bees. That’s right, not the letter B’s but bees as in buzzing. My twin sister and I decided to see how many bees we could catch. We got stung, ran in the house, got the stingers pulled out and went right back outside to catch more. We were like Steven Irwin but Bee Hunters instead.

The next collection was white little “baby” worms that we thought were just born. There were millions of them falling out of the trashcan outside and millions more underneath. We scooped them up by handfuls and put them in jars. We were going to start our own wormery. Once more, we ran inside to show our mother. She gasped and said, “Go throw those nasty maggots outside and come back inside and wash your hands with soap and hot water.”

The next collection was perfectly harmless – rocks. Until we ran out of space in our drawers, our closet, even our shoes. We just couldn’t find anymore spots to hide our “pretty” rocks. Our mom discovered our collection and ordered us to toss the rocks outside. It just didn’t seem fair. How come our older sister was allowed to put those big colorful lollipops on her wall? She would get them from Disneyland or Knotts Berry Farm and instead of eating them, she would hang them on her wall. It was a waste of good candy if you asked me. But, as fate would have it, her collection soon took on little crawling minds of their own in the form of ants. Billions of them. That was one time we were glad we had promised that we would never collect anything that had feet and belonged outside. She was on her own in exterminating her antsie friends.

My twin sister and I were crafty and creative with our collections. We saved empty vanilla flavoring bottles, stamps, cereal boxes, Barbie shoes, lost teeth, shiny pennies, broken crayons, marbles and unidentifiable objects.

Now that I’m a grown up (at least I act like one most of the time), my collection is much more sophisticated. I collect cookbooks, books, paperweights, figurines, carnival glass, advertising cans (from way back when), Little Rascals memorabilia, shoes (the kind that you wear—I have to have some way to justify buying so many of them). The problem with my collections is that once more, I’m running out of space. I’ve been told by my boo that unless I can find a place for it, I can’t collect anymore “stuff”. My solution?? Find a larger place to live. After all, every woman needs a collection or two!

What do you collect and why?