Just Add, "...in bed".

Five years ago, when I moved to Virginia from New York, I began collecting things.

I'd never been a collector or a nester. I'd lived my life with the idea that the key to happiness was one without attachments...without things. Sharing a small Brooklyn apartment with a boyfriend and a dog necessitated economy in every acquisition as well as intelligent planning and organization. But once I had a place of my own I began amassing cds which became an addiction several hundred discs later.

When my Mom, Patricia, died, I inherited her antique bed, books, stacks and stacks of Architectural Digest,  lamps, some of her cookware, a few of her garments, art,  her tchotchkes and mementos of every sort. Symbolically as Mom thought about her will and decided how her belongings were to be allocated I began collecting bird's nests when I found one lying on the sidewalk near her house.

On one birthday, my Mom's eldest sister, Rosemary,  gave me a nest from Caspari, with little speckled eggs made of chocolate. A colleague of mine, Melissa, brought two nests back from a trip to San Francisco as a thank you gift one of which was formed from mud and bits of plastic.  I don't know what I did to deserve them but I have four nests now.

Coffee table books became the next nest. I was the buyer for them at my store for a while. I don't have the space in my place for a coffee table and I don't have a living room but I dig art books. Most are just there for decoration. I have a coffee table. I have coffee. I have books. They make me happy in ways I'm not aware of, like little trips waiting to be taken, little lessons waiting to be learned.

Other things tried to be the next big collectible thing in my world. DVDs had reached their zenith but for awhile we were hot and heavy. Snooky's, the pawn shop downtown, had a deal- 6 dvds for $20- and for a bit I turned addict into a verb.

Then I sought to build the classic stereo system after I bought a 70's Phillips turntable and vinyl was back. I would need a house for that since I wanted to hide the speakers in the wall. Snow globes from places that didn't get snow was next but that meant getting people to collect them for me.

Once I had issues storing or displaying my collections I stopped collecting. My friend Monique and her man went to flea markets every weekend and bought great things to add to their apartment  in San Francisco. Monique's advice was if you love it you'll find a place for it but I couldn't hang.

In the 3 years I've lived in my apartment I have saved my pennies in a pickle jar on my bookcase and when it gets full I will roll those suckers, cash them in and start all over again. One thing I have been inadvertently collecting and didn't realize until I started this blog (and is my largest collection to date) is fortunes. I'm a bachelor living alone in a one bedroom bungalow and when you live alone you order a lot of Chinese takeout. I never knew what I wanted this blog to be about but most blogs have a theme, a gimmick and mine didn't have one.

Now mine will.