FROM DAY ONE...

So....I've been procrastinating about this for a few months.  I really wanted to start a blog to connect with other vintageaholics, retromaniacs and people like me for whom it is not a fad...it's our life.  My attempt to log into my newly created google account (and messing up the password a few times!) led me to the offer to start a blog.  Divine intervention?  Friendly nudge?  Opportunity to procrastinate a little bit longer?  I clicked the button, and wow--EaSy!  Shoulda, coulda, woulda...did.  I'm committed now, so smack me if I forget to post.

I am so over 9-5.  And working for someone else (other than my customers!)  And being told what to do, when to do it, and still walking on eggshells.  Now that doesn't mean I refuse to work 9-5 'cause you do what you gotta do.  I just don't want to.  Just not really for me, but God will decide when and if this self-employment thing will work out.  And I will continue to drop hints.  Heavy hints.  Heavy and often.

 I've been selling vintage online for a couple of years.  I've been collecting, wearing and decorating with it since I was a teenager.  I've been loving it forever.  14th Street.  It's where I grew up and played with my mom's perfume bottles on her dresser.  I'd arrange them according to size, in rows--and pretend they were a choir.  There, I said it!  My weird little secret is out.  (Confession is good for the soul.)  A few days later, I'd return and they would be "scattered" around, Odessa (mom) style.  And I would put them back in choir formation.  BTW, Evening in Paris was always the soloist.  I was six.

Over 40 years, two kids and one divorce later, I found myself back on 14th Street, a few miles from where I grew up.  On the other side of the street and in what used to be the other side of town.  Now it's pretty much meshed together, the descendants of the haves and the have nots blurring the lines and ignoring the hard work their grand and great-grandparents put into keeping them separate.  Now when I look out of my window I see the big white house on the hill that used to fascinate me when I rode by in the backseat of my Daddy's '61 Chevy, where the best a/c was the wind from the front windows and nobody made you wear a seatbelt.  I'm still fascinated and intrigued, but now instead of wondering who lives there, I wonder what kind of doorknobs they have.  Are they original?  Do they want them?  Can I buy a few?

So it is, and will be with my 14th Street Stories.  What used to be.  What is.  What is surely to come.  I don't  know how long I'll stay here, but it will stay with me forever.  You can take the girl off of 14th Street but...you know the rest.

Now to figure out how to add pictures...

DONE!