On any Sunday in France a brocante will be happening. Antiques will appear. Not just old, not just a hundred years old, but nearly two hundred year old things. Museum type of old things. Things that would even make my brother Mathew, with one "T", stop in his I hate the brocante tracks.
Of course you have to open your eyes, bend down, open the box, get your hands dirty… Having curiosity can discover a new world.
And so it was like any other Sunday in France, at the brocante. I found history in the everyday old things, heard stories, gathered more wonder and awe, and bought a few things.
Favorite story today: "Those manscripts survived the revolution, oh and by the way its not paper, its parcement, probably calf skin because it is so white."
Okay, so what I held in my hands wasn't a Voynich, but I was holding history, a story, and I took it a deep breath of its once-in-blue-moon-delight.
Going to the brocante is like that for me… discovering the extraordinary in the once upon a time ordinary things.
A Provencal scrap jar. These type of jar would sit on a kitchen counter, the fat scraps would be stored in them.
Yellow ones are the most common.
Green ones are next.
Then the cherished blues ones, hard to find.
Though white confit pots…. the real deal of hierarchy color.
Provencal confit pots or pottery do not have manufactor's stamps on the bottom like most cermanics do. I was told that it was like that because this type of pottery was consider practical, common, like a bucket… nothing more.
A hundred years later those common fat scrap buckets are so in demand.
The white one I bought, came home, gave it a bath, hugged it, and whispered in its hollow,
"Do you like tofu?"
French Husband and I arrived early, a man was unloading his car. Underneath the boxes and bags that went this way and that a zinc bathtub was hidden underneath.
Who can say they stuffed an antique zinc bathtub in their car?
A handmade antique silk and lace child's collar.
Why wouldn't this beautiful orangery pot fit in our car? Why!
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