Antiques

Objects in My House I Will Definitely Take to the Antiques Roadshow

I am sitting on many museum-quality artifacts

Maybe you’ve seen that PBS favorite, the Antiques Roadshow, in which people bring in some doodad they found in the attic and it turns out to be worth a fortune.

One of the best episodes featured a bowl a lady bought for a little bit of nothing from a yard sale. She used it to serve potato chips at parties. It turned out to be worth something like a million bucks. Can you imagine?

But you’ll see others bring in gorgeous antiques that have been in their families for generations and learn to their surprise that their treasured desk is worth about the same as the IKEA version.

You just never know, and after watching this show a few times, you start looking around your house, wondering what each piece might fetch.

As a poor writer, I’ve always dreamed of finding out that some tchotchke in my house would sell for enough to cover the cost of our gruel for the rest of our lives.

Here are the top contenders. If you happen to be an accomplished appraiser, let me know which ones you want to purchase and how many millions you will give me.

This Tiny Metal Chicken

Apparently, candy used to come in little metal chests? And include a little metal chicken? I suspect the dice are unrelated, but they were in the chest when I got it. I won’t even charge you extra for them.

It was my grandmother’s, apparently. Why she didn’t sell this combo herself and enjoy the good life is beyond me, but I am sure she would not judge me for selling this priceless family heirloom.

This Amazing Original Thing

At some point in college, I found out one could drop a class if one hated it sufficiently, and I did that a few times. Thus it was that graduation approached and I was a couple of credit hours behind where I should have been.

However, there was an easy remedy: You could get college credit for helping produce the annual arts festival, Celebration. It was there that I bought this Thing.

It is a mauve-purple flame Thing, made in 1986, and it matched my mauvey 1980s decor very well. Now I live in a Victorian house, but everything is really eclectic and I never throw anything away, so it’s still on display. Willing to part with it for a number in the low six figures.

This Questionable Piece of Haitian Penis Folk Art

This figure, purchased from an artist in Haiti by a guy I used to work with who was on a medical mission there, wears a wooden barrel. When you pull off the barrel, a very big surprise pops up and you laugh. And then you wonder if this art might be racist.

And then you think about all the classic Western art that shows tons of nekkid women, and you think that perhaps the Haitian man who made this was ahead of his time. Perhaps he felt that equality demanded that the male form also be recognized as a work of art. Anyway, make me an offer.

This 16th Century Chocolate Pot

I bought this from a Belgian street market having no idea what in the hell it was the last time we went to Europe. I would have bought everything at the market if I’d had unlimited funds and suitcase space. Instead, I bought this one thing. I mentioned it in a previous Medium piece, The Museum of Me, and learned from fellow Medium writer Vanessa Brown that it’s a Dutch/Spanish/French copper chocolate pot. She was absolutely right.

Of all the old things in my house, including me, this is probably the oldest. And unlike me, it’s apparently actually worth a bit. PayPal me, please — we wanna go visit my Dutch husband’s relatives and plane fare ain’t cheap.

You Will Need This After The Apocalypse

You probably make your coffee with a Keurig or something right now, but do you have a plan for how you’ll grind your coffee beans once this whole civilization thing goes down? I am not exactly sure how I will get coffee beans once that occurs, but I know I will get them somehow. The alternative is too awful to contemplate. And as there will be no grid to live off of, we will all have to figure out how to grind our coffee beans by hand.

When that happens, you will wish like hell you’d bought this from me when you had the chance. I will make you a deal because I have a back-up hand-powered grinder.

This Amazing Organic Plastic Sculpture

You know how sometimes, you walk into an art show and you know you simply must have a certain piece of art? So it was when I walked into a Tuesday Morning one day and saw Brigitte for the first time. I immediately knew she was just the thing to hold my mail inside my front door. She is 100 percent genuine resin, which (I just looked this up) is essentially organic plastic.

If you do not have an organic plastic figure of a 1920s woman in your Victorian parlor, I do not know what you even think you are doing with your life.

This Dusty Gnome Dude

When I was gifted this handmade birdhouse, I knew it belonged in my kitchen, and I further understood its front porch needed a gnome. Don’t judge me for not dusting this before taking the picture. This is an old house with high ceilings and you can’t see this dust at all if you’re standing on the floor. The only reason you can see the dust here is because I was precariously perched atop a shaky stool, and I was lucky to get a picture before falling and breaking a hip. Taking time to dust it first would have been dangerous.

What are you saying, exactly — that you think I should have risked my life just to remove a bit of dust? That’s not very caring of you. I’ll forgive you if your offer is good enough.

This Oriental Antique Cookie Press

As the sticker clearly proves, this cookie press is an antique from the Orient.

I know it resembles those overpriced cookie presses of the ’80s that someone probably bought at a home party and never used and then gave to me when she was decluttering her house because I am understood to never turn down anything. But trust me, it is worth big bucks. I’ll let it go for five of them.

This Cast Iron Bacon Press

In theory, a bacon press is a great idea. Bacon always curls up. In reality, I never use it, because I am married to a vegetarian, so bacon is a rarity around here. Whatever. Do you want it or not?

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