One other thing I did over the weekend was change the mantel decorations. (I decided that as Sunday the 31st was Pentecost, it was high time to remove the Easter decorations I had up).

I went sort of minimalist this time.



It's the little collection of china dogs I've acquired over the years. I haven't added to it recently, partly because I haven't really been looking (I don't, at the moment, have a good "permanent" space to display them; they sit on one of the book case shelves in front of books, which gets in the way when I want to take one of those books off the shelf).

I think the last one I bought was the little poodle (second from the right in this photo) and that was maybe a year ago:



It's funny how I can develop little collections of things. I guess some people have the collector tendency and others don't. I have friends who would be aghast at the level of "clutter" I have in my house - lots of things hanging on the walls, shelves of stuff, bric-a-brac...I knew someone in college who said one of her life's ambitions was to own few enough things that all of her life's possessions would fit in a backpack. (My response was: what about books? And she agreed that yes, books would be a problem - in many places you could rely on libraries, but part of her life-plan with the backpack was that it would allow her to travel to and live in remote areas...where there would be no libraries.)

I wonder if there's some fundamental insecurity that drives a person to accumulate things. I realize that's not a very pretty observation but the why of it does make me wonder.

Or I wonder if people who spent lonely childhoods, in a way - mine was kind of lonely. I was an only child until I was 5, and while I had friends, some of them lived across town, and the others were part of large families themselves - and I spent a lot of time alone as a child. I liked it but I also do think that that kind of thing affects a person's personality. Perhaps the fact that I spent a lot of time making up stories in my head - that I spent a lot of time playing by myself with my stuffed toys or my little plastic zoo animals - led me as an adult to feel more comforted with things that I could look at and (if not make up fanciful stories about) remember where and when I got them.

I wonder if people who grew up in large families have less of a tendency to collect things. (I am sure someone will now post a comment disproving that hypothesis).

The other thing is - those "clean and spare house" shows be darned - I LIKE my clutter. Yes, it makes dusting more complicated, yes, it's not many people's style, but it makes me smile when I come home and see the little china dogs lined up on a shelf, or when I am brushing my teeth in my bathroom and I can stand and look at all the souvenir plates I have found and hung up on the wall. I think I'd feel kind of lost and maybe in a strange way, lonely in one of those spare, all-white houses where all the family heirlooms and such have either been hidden away or banished to the flea market. (I don't watch those house-decluttering shows much, but I've seen enough clips to make me cringe: homeowner holds up some object and talks about how it belonged to a grandparent. Decluttering maven cringes in horror and demands that they sell the object. Homeowner meekly goes along. I'd be a bad candidate for those shows because if some decluttering maven made noises about my grandfather's Columbia Encyclopedia of Literature or the doilies that came from my grandmother's house, and suggested I sell them to "free up space," they'd be met with a rather rude response in the negative.)

Actually, speaking of grandparents, I do know WHY I started the little collection of dogs. My grandmother had, on one of the little wall shelves, a small china bulldog standing next to his little china doghouse. Like many things from her house, I don't know what became of it (when she passed away, my own parents were in the process of moving, and one of her other daughters was not well - after retrieving a few "important" items, the house was rented out and I don't know if a lot of the stuff that remained was stolen, or sold, or just thrown out). But one day in an antique shop here, I found a little china bulldog that, while not the same as the one my grandmother had, was similar enough to remind me of it. It's the second from the right on this photo:



And then, of course, I decided I wanted other dogs to keep the bulldog company. And so it goes.

I really should put up a little wall shelf somewhere to give them their own permanent home.