Collector or Hoarder? #T

I have a friend who is a collector of certain artsy items.  These are neither cheap nor tacky, yet he has hundreds of them and will buy more as he finds them.  They have not driven him from his home, for while he has many dozens of them tastefully displayed throughout the house, the vast majority of them are neatly stored in boxes in the garage and attic.  He is a collector, a consumer of fine art.  

I have known a number of people, both men and women, who are hoarders.  These people amass stuff.  Once they acquire an item they cannot rid themselves of it.  These things may have value, they may be useless, but the clutter they create builds to the point that the occupant of the house has mere aisles eighteen inches wide between piles of junk, a path from a kitchen, a bathroom, one to a bedroom.  Papers, books, magazines stacked four feet high, unimaginable and unusable trash everywhere.  If there were a treasure in the lot, the heirs will never find it, for they will simply have the stuff shoveled into dumpsters when the owner dies.  Hoarder.

Oh, by the way.  Neither the stuff of the hoarder nor the collector has any eternal value.  Jesus said, 

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:

But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.  --Matthew 6:19,20

For the Birds

I know you may find this hard to

but BBBH and I had a bit of a 

a while ago.

Come, my little

and I will tell you all about it.

Perhaps in the over all scheme of things, it is really nothing to

about; but nevertheless,

my Lady is still

.

Well, maybe a little "crow."

 We'll come back to that.

Owl, I swan, the hen is in a bonnet.

Wait.  These are not birds.

 

The drive took us through some lovely corn fields, some beautiful soybean fields.  But the drive through the small town brought us to an "antique" shoppe.  One does not pass such a place: The Gospel according to BBBH.  So stop we did.

BBBH collects cookie jars.  Now why on earth she didn't choose instead to collect hatpins or something that could easily be kept in a shoebox or a dresser drawer, I will never know.  Oh, wait a sec.  She does collect hatpins.  And hats.  But why belabor the point?  She is a collector.

The thing about cookie jars is that no matter how cute, or how grotesque, as the case may be, they take up lots of space, and require a flat surface for display.  Hence a frequent plaint is "I need more shelves."  Or worse, "It would be so simple for you to make me some shelves,"  yada, yada, yada.

So I got a bit sidetracked.  The stop in the shop is where the "lark" comes in, for She Who Must be Obeyed is in a bit of heaven when she is in such a place, and I am sure that we will spend a good bit of eternity there before departing.  Thus it is that often I will scan the entire place and exit same while she is still looking at the first display!  I am not exaggerating.  Anyway, the part that is hard to swallow is that she found not one, but two cookie jars that she had to have.  The first is the crow, the second the hen.  She already had the owl.

Pigs? you say.  Why pigs?  Well, I found those.  They are Shawnee pigs.  They are small, and the price was right.  Worn a bit?  Yes.  A blind pig and a one-eyed pig.  But they are Shawnees.  I will do that within the constricts of a very limited budget for such gew-gaws.

cf pigs and cookie jar:  pigs are 3.25  inches tall, crow is 12  inches.