Precious Dust

In the rural town of Townsend, MA, there are many antique shops housed in former barns and farmhouses. Townsend is just half an hour from American K9 Country, in Amherst, NH, Liberty’s training and boarding facility. We usually pass through whenever we go to Western Massachusetts, or if we are boarding Liberty and then driving to New York or Pennsylvania. We have visited lots of those antique shops over the years. Primarily long buildings with rows of vendors, cubicled-off from one another, they sell pretty much the same stuff you find in your parent’s or grandparent’s basement, attic or garage: old Formica kitchen tables, mason jars, Bakelite dish-ware, doilies, worn-out toys, and furniture that has seen lots of use. Some have displays of coins, faded photographs, rugs, paintings, records and strange, unfashionable clothing you can’t imagine anyone ever wearing. The stuff in these shops usually dates from the 1900’s to the 1970’s.

But today we visited Antique Associates of west Townsend, situated in an old ochre-colored farmhouse and barn with dark cranberry trim. The rooms were just as they had been when the building was used as a farmhouse: small, dark with crooked wooden floors and staircases leading you to places other than you had expected. Tole-painted hope chests, rockers and cradles, beautifully primitive and un-signed filled the first room. A carved wooden painted bowl from the 1700’s, large enough for me to fit in, sat atop a rustic table.

Many of the narrow second-floor rooms were lined on both sides with glass cases, which held early pottery, Redware, Native American baskets, 18th and 19th c. miniatures, pewter, early glass wear, daguerrotypes and hand-made toys. Other rooms and hallways were filled with portraits of and by anonymous people from the 19th c. The quality of the paintings as well as their frames and their excellent condition showed them to have been gently cared for. Beautifully-made 18th c. furniture filled other rooms along with desks, beds, chests and boxes decorated with faux-grain to make the wood look expensive. We passed by George Washington’s, Daniel Webster’s and the King of Sweden’s portraits hanging alongside paintings of schooners.

A well-lit but narrow hallway was lined on both sides with 18th and 19th c. pistols, swords, and rifles, safely locked behind glass. They ranged from a tiny derringer small enough to hide in one’s hand to a dark, cumbersome-looking blunderbuss, whose barrel ended in the shape of a clarinet. It resembled the hunter’s guns from my illustrated childhood album cover of “Peter and the Wolf.” All looked as if they had been well-cared for. Most had been used in Europe and America’s endless wars. Like the carefully-preserved toys in other exhibits they lay silently on their white cloth background.

“How many of you have killed someone?” I murmured as I passed by. Needlepoint samplers, crafted by young maidens, displayed gentility and skill. The elaborate samplers, un-doubtably made by girls lucky enough to have the leisure time and training, hung in gilded frames. We followed more stairs to the first floor where were rooms full of crockery, beautifully shaped to hold grains, flour, seeds and liquids. 

My favorite items were the weather vanes, the whimsy-diddles and, especially one hand fan made from cypress wood and covered with a silken top upon which were portraits of the founding fathers. A room all to itself on the ground floor held modern photographic equipment, used in appraising items. I expected the staff from Antiques Roadshow to emerge.

We could have no more afforded to buy anything from the Antiques Associates of Townsend than we could have from the Met. But our house is full of old lovely things, many handmade by me over the course of my life, and things that made their way to us, giving us hints about the lives of

their previous owners. Perhaps someday, new hands will lovingly polish and use things from our household, passing them on to yet others who will cherish them until, like all of those who touched them, they crumble and return to the elements from which everything originated.