THE THINGS WE KEEP

People like to say that one person's trash is another person's treasure. It gets said so often it might as well be printed on the price tags at every flea market in the country, but I've never been able to argue with it. What one person is finished with can be the very thing that stops someone else in the middle of an aisle. Those things are seldom worth much. More often, they're simply familiar.

I think I was thrifting long before I knew there was a word for it. Some of my earliest memories are of tagging along with my grandmother when I was four or five, back in Brampton, where I was born and raised. There was one place we went more than any other. We called it the Sally Ann, though I couldn't tell you now what the sign out front actually said. It was somebody's old house that had been turned into a store, and to a little girl it felt like a museum. Room after room, floor after floor, all of it full of things that had belonged to other people, just waiting to be picked up and turned over in small hands.

Decades later, when my husband and I were living in Innisfil, one of our regular outings was the antique market at the 400 Flea Market. We'd grab a coffee on the way in and spend an hour or two drifting up and down the aisles without a single thing in mind, which I still believe is the only proper way to do it. You'd turn a corner and there it would be, something you hadn't thought about since you were a kid, and just like that you were back there. The smell of it. The feel of it in your hand. The tinny whir of a toy you used to wind up. A kitchen canister exactly like the one that sat on your grandmother's counter. An old sign, a book, a camera. The thing you begged for one Christmas and never got, or the thing you did have that went missing somewhere between childhood and now. Those are the ones that get you. It's hardly ever the expensive pieces. It's the ones you recognize.

Cameras have always been my weakness. I love the weight of them, the way the mechanics click and catch, the leather cases gone soft at the corners. I can't hold one without wondering about all the pictures it took before it ended up on a shelf waiting for somebody new. The childhood things get me the same way, the ones that make me stop and say out loud, I remember that. Sometimes I buy them only because seeing them again feels good. Other times I find myself thinking about my own children, and how much I'd love to hand them a small piece of the world I grew up in, a time they never got to see for themselves.

Maybe that's why things get harder to let go of as we get older. When you're young, most of what you own is about what you want next. Somewhere along the way that changes, and you start caring more about what's worth keeping. Some things earn their place by being useful. Some because they were made well, by someone who took their time. And some because they remind us of a person, or a house, or a stretch of years, or just the way life used to feel.

Then there are the things that were never part of our story at all. We find them at a market or an antique booth, a thrift store, a roadside sale, a box pushed to the back of somebody's barn. We have no idea who owned them or where they sat before, but something about them feels worth carrying forward. I like that idea more and more, especially now, when so much of what we bring home is made to be replaced nearly as fast as we buy it. Finding the opposite never gets old. An old wool coat with decades of wear still left in it. A wooden bowl worn smooth from years of use. A duck decoy with its paint chipped down to the grain. A piece of pottery that came out of the kiln a little crooked. A camera that hasn't taken a photograph in fifty years and still deserves a spot on the shelf. I can't help it. Anything that carries the marks of a life already lived pulls me right in.

Clothing works the same way. Every few years a colour comes back around and gets announced as though nobody's ever seen it before. Burgundy comes back. Wool comes back. Leather, plaid, all of it. Pieces vanish from the stores for a while and then suddenly everyone wants them again, while some of us never stopped wearing them in the first place. It was on my mind when I wrote about burgundy not long ago. Good things don't belong to one season. Sometimes they just sit and wait for the rest of the world to catch up, and objects are no different.

Which brings me to something that has been slowly taking shape here at Canadian Huntress. Over nearly eight years, this space has grown right alongside my own life. Hunting will always be at the heart of it, along with the outdoors, conservation, heritage, clothing, food, home and all the ordinary pieces that make up a life lived around those things. But there has always been more sitting around the edges. The things I find. The things I collect. The things I drag home because I know I'll regret leaving them behind, and the things I don't need myself but know someone else will understand the second they see them.

Five years in our 1880s limestone house hasn't helped matters. An old house has a way of asking for company. Walls that thick and floors that worn seem to want things with a past, and little by little, without much of a plan, I started filling ours with enamelware, a hand saw, a canoe paddle, a cast iron pan, an old lantern. Things from the barn and the cottage, the kitchen and the field, made to be used and used hard. Some of it has found a permanent home here. But a house can only hold so much, and a lot of what I've gathered deserves a better life than a shelf in my back room.

So we're making room. Lost & Found is a small collection of one-of-a-kind and vintage pieces I've picked up along the way, for the home, the cottage, the cabin, the farm, the field, or wherever they happen to belong next. There's only one of each, and when it's gone, it's gone. Thrifting, to me, is never about walking into a store knowing exactly what will be on the shelf. It's about the chance that something good might be waiting there. Something useful, or beautiful, or a little bit strange. Maybe something you haven't laid eyes on since you were five years old. After all these years, I still love the hunt.

Some things are bought, some are handed down, and some are found. And every so often, if you're lucky, you come across one worth keeping.

Lost & Found opens November 15th.

Outside Looks Good On You™

Until next time,

Dana