Full Circle

 

Oh it has been a very busy Spring so far.
Between emptying out our house in the country, and making plans to come back to New York, college applications, financial aid forms, taxes, posting on Basic French's Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/basicfrenchonline) plus the everyday stuff of everyday life, I cannot even find a moment to write about what I am doing.

I think we are all so busy. Too busy somehow. And while life sure is interesting, not having time to reflect on what you have done, what you are doing and what you dream of doing is not interesting.

I took a few days off from the computer and Basic French and went to the south of France with my very good friend Yves, fabulous creative person and very fun partner in crime. We went on a road trip to check out the professional flea markets of Beziers, Avignon and Montpellier. My head was spinning I learned so much and while we were crazy busy trying to see all that there was to see, I was completely captivated. On the car ride between the different shows, we talked all about what we had seen, what we could transform into something else  (glass bottles and jelly jars into lamps, vintage fabric into pillows,) I realize that I am a life long flea marketer, a born buyer and seller. I am not a collector, really, because I am a minimalist and objects easily flow into my life and out adding their visual impression to the collage of my mind.

I have been having and going to yard sales since I was a child and I have always had the "goût de l'insolite" (taste for the unusual.) I realized, as we listened to the random stories of "la provenance" of an object, as told by its enthusiastic seller, that I am most fascinated by the stories and by each object's place and function in history. So I have been studying; studying furniture, pottery and the art of upholstery and in so doing, studying French history. I absorb this knowledge so easily because it interests me. It is like information recycling, repurposing small details to pass history along.

Coming full circle with Basic French, which started as a tiny little antique space in the bathroom of a cooperative Rhinebeck antiques store, we will be introducing a line of vintage furniture this fall: overstuffed chairs, newly upholstered in vintage fabric, vintage lamps rewired and re-shaded, + + 

Happily, we will never forget our simple past as long as we guard our objects dear.