Today's Keyboard Smash

[scrubjayspeaks]

I spent part of the morning shopping the storage container. That's where we keep all the furniture that couldn't fit in the house (don't ask, it's complicated), as well as a lot of breakable stuff that either hasn't been hung up (paintings, photos, decorative plates, wall-mounted weaponry) or can't be displayed without additional furniture surfaces (see above re: tiny house). I've got a bookshelf full of, among other things, the very fragile bits and bobs I used to assemble an altar of sorts. I have had a deep desire to light candles lately, so I went in there looking for a particular rotating stand for pillar candles.

I emerged, rather later than initially planned, with:

Two brass candlesticks
A brass incense burner
Several packages of loose incense substances purchased circa 2004
A box of still more incense
A roll of small charcoal briquettes for, you guessed it, burning incense
A huge hunk of quartz
A polished stone orb and stand
Some sort of tube-shaped shell assembly (marine worms?)
...and yes, the rotating stand.

I also had a flashback to my teenage years when I found a book of matches from Wicks 'n Sticks, a shop I could not have told you existed if asked prior to this morning but which I could reconstruct from memory alone now that I've been reminded of it. This is the Suncoast Incident all over again.

I found a number of other things I either didn't remember I owned until I saw them again or knew I owned but hadn't consciously thought about in years. Since they got packed up in 2013 and put into a storage unit to await a new home, really, because I haven't unpacked a lot of things since bringing them up here. This has only increased my desire to purchase or construct some cube-style shelving for my bedroom wall in which to display plush toys and, apparently, psychedelic whale piggy banks from the 1970s. (Yes, really. There's a donkey one as well. Among many, many other things.)

I have also obtained two tapers for the candlesticks and finally, after probably more than a decade of hoarding them, one piece from a set of six large, mushroom-shaped candles. I've recently begun to have less and less patience for my own (apparently genetic) tendency to stash things away for, oh, the proper occasion. ~Wouldn't want to use them up; then I wouldn't have them anymore!~

Absolute garbage. I'm going to use things and enjoy them before I'm dead and it doesn't matter anymore.

So while I got writing done, I sat in my otherwise darkened room with lit candles and burning incense. It was lovely. My room is going to smell like a New Age store in fairly short order, as it did from the ages of, oh, 11 to 19 at minimum. It already looks like a witch's hut in there. Ought to smell like it too.

Comments

[harpers_child]

I had my "use it now" moment when my dad and his siblings were going through their parents' house after my grandparents passed. Tucked away in cabinets were wedding presents that had never been used, some of which still had the wrapping paper partially intact. Beautiful cut crystal glasses of various styles. The cards tucked inside the boxes indicated they were from my great-grandparents friends. I don't know what occasion they were waiting for over the decades. Somehow they never found one. (Iced tea tastes awesome out of cut crystal goblets, btw.)

[scrubjayspeaks]

Yeah, we've got a bad case of that, right down to the original wrapping paper thing. It's partly just that the house is so small, you can't FIT all the things in there for regular use. But even so. We could at least prioritize better.

I see your iced tea and raise you ice cream sodas out of cut crystal goblets with sterling silver spoons. :D