old vintage and new vintage

i got a huge vintage embroidered screen almost ten years ago at scott antique market. i loved it then and love it now. this is just a small portion of it. it includes a whole night forest landscape with lots of owls, stags, and the moon. mum hung on to it when i moved because my lifestyle had been rough on it. there was some kind of chrysalis embedded in the silk, and my cat figaro (rip) had made short work of most of the trim. so mum lovingly cleaned and repaired it and now it's a nice partition to hide some of her works-in-progress..

then this weekend we went to the very same market, and i returned with this guy:

i haven't noticed antique mounted fox heads before, but i saw two this weekend. i thought the second one might be the long-lost missus, but after agonizing i thought one fox head is probably enough for one household.

i have such dissonance when it comes to objects. i am always battling with clutter because i worry that i have serious hoarding tendencies. we only have a tiny farmhouse and i need to be able to breathe in there and be able to find my stuff. but now i seem to be falling into selling vintage. mostly because i have it, i love it, i love finding and collecting. and i come from a long line of women who have bought and sold old things. my grandma was constantly toting something in her yellow pinto (she called it her "junking car"). my great-grandmother went to auctions almost daily and sold to dealers. she was known to redecorate her entire house on a whim. and then there is mum, the master. her knowledge and skill and luck are uncanny. antique dealing as she does it is art, or magic.

you may have noticed that i am (perhaps nauseatingly) nostalgic. i am always on the lookout for vintage linens for my stitching, but then i find myself feeling sorry for some little abandoned thing and taking it home. i wonder if it's a little psycho to be concerned with rescuing objects. but do they not have all kinds of emotional resonances about them? even when they are not tugging at our heart strings like my fantastic mr. fox head (who said, "take me home NOW! i was freakin' ripped apart by hounds, don't let me rot here on this shelf!") even when they are not so beseeching, they still might remind us of something we once knew, or felt, or the future we want to live.