It's thrifted!

Help—I've turned into my father

When I was younger, I wanted to be surrounded by modern things. I was obsessed with the word. It was the antithesis of the house I was growing up in. I dreamed of owning a piece of Ikea furniture. I wanted gadgets—a karaoke machine, a DS, a Wii. A house with white walls and a glass door was what I hoped to get out of the game MASH.

The house I grew up in was old, and everything in it was old too. The stone exterior was full of etchings from past owners. In the winter it was difficult to stay warm because my bedroom’s wooden floor served as a ceiling for the room below it. I wanted was a basement with a flatscreen TV to host slumber parties in front of, but the basement we had was more suited for tools and dust.

Had I known how long it took my parents to transform our house from a dilapidated farmhouse to a home on a busy street with a functioning kitchen, maybe I wouldn’t have been so hard on them. The house I grew up in was built in 1786 and was home to farmers, war heroes, and the Bassett family—yes, of ice cream fame. After a grade school friend told my dad how much she loved our home’s charm, he sat me down and told me that one day I’d come to appreciate it—and that it wasn’t that weird to have a fireplace in your bedroom.

My dad is the one who loved old things first. If he wasn’t working outside in the yard on the weekend, you could find him at an antique store in the region. He filled my childhood with oil paintings, wooden desks, and rugs that looked like they had seen better days. When he’d travel for work, he was bound to come home with a treasure trove of trinkets—old vices, rusty looking horseshoes, ginger jars. And just like he had predicted, I didn’t understand it until I was older.

my mom, sister, and me following my dad around the Quakertown Antique Mall

My father’s love for physical objects must be a genetic thing. Just like my dad would stop at every booth at an antique mall, I now must see everything on offer at a thrift store. I began thrifting in high school with my sister and our best friend at a warehouse-sized secondhand store up the street from our houses (ours old, hers newer). We’d run into the dressing rooms with more hangers than we were able to carry to try on pants, tops, dresses, and jackets of all sizes from every decade. Even if something didn’t quite fit the right way or had seen better days (like maybe the ’90s?), we’d buy it. We might never find something like it again! Was this the thrill my dad was chasing?

I’ve turned into my father so quickly that I had to put myself on a thrifting pause last month in an effort to practice more mindfulness when it comes to bringing things into my apartment. It’s not small, but there’s little to no storage built in to most of the rooms. For example, almost everything is on display in the kitchen—we have a metro shelf for a pantry and an old bookcase houses cookbooks and plates. At the start of the year I purged the kitchen of expired ingredients, dusted each and every shelf, and rearranged the setup of each shelf with the products that remained. I was reminded of all of the stuff I’ve accumulated over the years. The need for another vase or salad bowl virtually disappeared when I was surrounded by the ones I already have—the stout blue vase I took from an old building’s “free shelf”; the speckled teal pitcher I bought a day before moving out of my last place; the handmade ceramic salad bowl that called out to me from the window display of Goodwill. The same thing happened when I cleaned out my closet. I dipped into the large bag of clothes I keep under my bed to freshen up my wardrobe (without buying anything new, of course) was reminded of my past self.¹

Thrifting has allowed me to play with my personal style—both in my closet and my home—and each time I wear or use something from the thrift store, I’m reminded of who I was when I got it. The high schooler looking for clothes to take to college now that she doesn’t wear a uniform. The freshman in college shopping at Beacon’s Closet with her new roommates after the first week of class. The confused college graduate living at home and in search of a career. When neither an algorithm nor retail merchandiser is influencing the purchases you make, you reach for something you actually like. Wool, canvas, that sparkly yarn that’s threaded throughout a sweater ever so lightly. Handmade ceramics, enamelware, Pyrex glass.

My affinity for things was passed down to me through my dad’s side of the family. After my grandfather passed away, my grandmother had a lot of stuff to go through. Pop-Pop loved to shop—he had kitchen gadgets for every task, sweatshirts and baseball hats galore, and the garage was stocked full of old tools and parts from his days at the phone company. When it came to the things left in her kitchen before her move, my grandmother passed down as much as I was willing to take—a vintage Pyrex dish; four red glass canisters that sat on her counter, full of flour, tea, and sugar (I think they were a wedding gift); tiny white ramekins; an old pasta machine that was probably used by my great-grandmother.

In a world full of so much stuff, I’m hesitant to say I love things. Whether you call them trinkets or tchotchkes, don’t you want all the small things that live in your space to speak to you? Old things have stories, and maybe that’s what my dad was searching for in all of those antique malls. Whether my parents loved a certain object or not, it had more meaning to it because it had more than one life. I love inheriting objects, I love filling a space or closet with things from the past. They’re already full of life, and I get to tell someone about it. “Thank you, it’s thrifted!!!!”

1. My sister calls this an archive.