Take up a Collection

Four images: colorful stamps, assorted books on a shelf, red London phone booth keychains, and a pile of old coins on a textured surface.

A woman with glasses and a red shirt smiles in a green field. Text describes her as a content creator and career coach.

A hobby can be anything these days, but it almost always involves a collection of some sort. If reading is your hobby, you probably have shelves full of books. If traveling is your hobby, you could have souvenirs from your trips set out around your home.

Some folks collect coins, stamps, sports memorabilia, and the like all because they've taken up a hobby, but sometimes your collection sneaks up on you.

My mom was a city girl before she became a farm wife. My maternal grandparents were her closest neighbors. She learned a lot about being a farm wife from my grandma and a lot about being a farmer from my grandpa.

Woman in straw hat smiles holding crate of vegetables in greenhouse. Green plants surround her, suggesting a vibrant, sunny mood.

One of her lessons was that you didn’t just run to town every time you needed one or two things from the grocery store. You kept a list and made the trip every couple of weeks. My dad would sometimes grumble that her asking to make a quick stop by the store for milk and bread usually ended up with a cart full of stuff by the time she was done.

Person holding a handwritten shopping list at a market. Fruits displayed in the background. A child stands nearby, suggesting a shopping scene.

One summer our family project was repainting the sucker rod fence around the house. Somewhere along the line, my mom had read that you could freeze used paint brushes so you didn’t have to clean them out every night.

Every day when we got done, our paint mitts would go into a trash bag that was stored in the chest-style freezer, as opposed to the upright one. It wasn’t until we tried to have hamburgers for supper one evening that we noticed something amiss about the buns. Those buns had been thawed out after being stored in the same freezer as the paint mitts and now they tasted suspiciously like latex paint. Needless to say, none of us could stomach eating our burger on a bun for that meal.

Black iron fence with decorative finials on left, a gloved hand painting a white post on right. Blurry house in background, autumn colors.

As I got older and started stocking my own cupboards, I made the joke that my mom didn’t know what was in the bottom of her deep freeze—again the chest-style one, not the upright. She proclaimed that she knew exactly what was in it only to call me a week later and admit she had been wrong. Let’s just say she didn’t buy any Cool Whip for a while after that.

Sometimes it is good to take a look at your collection to make sure you don’t have any duplicates.