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When desire to acquire meets need to de-acceed
Or: the opposite of a haul video. By B.J. Roche When she was younger, my mother-in-law Jeanne used to travel a lot in Europe, but as she got older, she really liked to visit outlet malls. Once I accompanied her and my sister-in-law Kathy on a pilgrimage to Kittery, Maine, and since I had never been there before, I just couldn't stop shopping. Jones New York! Gap! Nine West! Yes! Not Jeannie. She liked to look. At all the pretty stuff. The new Lladro figurines. The Etienne Aigner shoes. The nice pocketbooks. The beautiful plates and napkins at the Dansk store. We'd check at the Royal Doulton ladies and talk about how much our old ones might now be worth. But she never bought a thing. At times I felt like the dippy daughter-in-law I was, spending all her son's money. Then I realized, Jeannie liked the hunt, but she didn't need a damn thing. She'd already had her success and no longer needed to dress for it. And since she had moved into a small apartment among retired nuns (another post for another day), she had no room for more crap. I've been thinking about her as I've been travelling in France the past week, as I manage the internal battle among 1. wanting to bring home everything I see, and 2. having a credit card limit, and 3. no longer having the room for crap, mental or physical. It's a problem, because when we travel, especially in a place like France, we want not just the experience of being there, but we want to have a different life when we come home. A finer life that can only be created with the stuff we see over there. Or so we think. This life includes lovely old French books strewn on one's coffee table.
It includes an evening supper of superb cheese served on exquisite antique plates, a different place setting for each day of the week. We want to wake up beneath bedspreads of Provencal fabric, and because we can't decide which pattern we like the most, we want to buy one of each.
We want to drink our afternoon tea from a cup made from fine porcelain in the red and yellow Tarrascon pattern.
We want a life that includes the occasional bejeweled shoes.
And those kooky coffee pots in the flea market? We must buy them all and arrange them on the kitchen windowsill. They would look so cute.
We want, we want, we want. Then my inner old lady began to kick in. An inner old lady with a digital camera and a blog. I realized: I could have the pleasure of looking at all these things without buying them. As the bitches used to say back in junior high: "Take a picture, it lasts longer." So I did. And it does. It turned out to be a brilliant travel strategy. Probably not a bad one for life, either.
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