Trash or treasure?

   

When I was young my grandma would take me to browse through garages, barns, yards and markets filled with hidden treasures. I did not always see it as the treasure hunt that I believe it to be now. I remember asking my grandmother why anyone would want some of these items. She laughed and told me, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. Then she handed me her bag and started browsing again.

 

I looked down at the bag she had handed me; it was an old bedraggled burlap bag with one strap dangling by a few threads. As I looked into the bag of miscellaneous items she had found that day, I began to wonder how these things could be considered treasure. A Ziploc baggie full of mismatched buttons and various pieces of cast off fabrics from someone’s scrap pile lined the bottom of the bag. There was also a glass bottle full of pale yellow lotion two years past its expiration date.  She had even picked up a cobalt blue mason jar that was missing it’s lid. What in the world would she do with these things?

The next week I was sitting on my grandma’s bed, dressing my Barbies in the new clothes she had made for them. She looked up from her paper and chuckled as she set it aside. “Why are you laughing?” I asked, looking to see if I had dressed a Barbie in something funny. 

She smiled and gestured towards the Barbie I had in my hand. “I like your Barbie's dress”, she said. “Does the fabric look familiar?” I looked at the Barbie, trying to remember where I had seen the fabric before. Finally the light bulb above my head flickered to life! The dress was made from some of the scraps of fabric she had gotten form the flea market last week.

As my grandma saw realization dawn on my face she pointed towards her nightstand. As I searched to identify what she was pointing at I saw the pink and white faces of the Lazy Susans we had cut from the garden that morning. As I admired the flowers, a second switch flipped in my head and the light bulb came on. The flowers weren’t in just any vase; they were showcased like something right out of my grandma’s gardening magazines. They were on display in a cobalt blue mason jar with a strip of burlap tied into a bow around the center. The burlap was embellished with various shapes and sizes of buttons in multiple hues of blue. This added the perfect flair of her unique style to the room. 

I began to search the room for the other item she had bought last week: the glass bottle full of expired lotion. My grandma smiled and pointed to her vanity. At first I didn’t recognize it, and then a flash of yellow caught my eye. The bottle was sitting on her vanity in front of the mirror lined up with various other bottles filled with fragrances and lotions. I walked to her vanity and picked up the bottle. I barely recognized it except for the pale yellow tint of the glass. As I examined the bottle I realized it was filled with an amber liquid, and it had white tulips etched into the glass. I must have missed that beautiful detail when the bottle had held the pale yellow lotion. Instead of the screw on cap that had originally been on it, there was now a yellow tulip wine stopper pushed into the mouth of the bottle. I pulled off the stopper and realized that my grandmother had filled it with her favorite perfume. “How clever” I thought. She had made the old bottle into a perfume bottle and was using the old wine stopper as an applicator. The bottle sparkled and shimmered in the sunlight streaming through the window, and that light bulb moment hit me again. I finally understood what my grandma had been trying to tell me this whole time. I turned and shot her a hundred watt smile.

I got up and went to retrieve the paper she had discarded earlier. I finally understood why she would search the sales section every weekend looking for a few sales that caught her attention. I knew why we would get up at six in the morning every Sunday to go to the flea market before church. It even made sense why we would drive miles out of the way in the middle of nowhere just to follow the signs that advertised a barn sale. We did it, because my grandmother could make one man’s trash turn into her personal treasure, and I couldn’t wait to make my own. I opened the paper to the sales section and plopped down on the floor in front of her chair. I looked over my shoulder to see her grinning from ear to ear. So I smiled back and asked “Well grandma, where would you like to go treasure hunting today?”