My future little hidey-hole.

I have a thing for drawers, hidey-holes, nooks and crannies, and hidden spaces. I love old-timey furniture, like roll-top desks, card catalogues, coffee tables that double as storage space, and intricate bookcase headboards. Once, I found an ancient, wooden dentist’s cabinet at an antique mall. If I had $3,000 lying around, that baby would have been mine. It had thin drawers designed to hold instruments, tiny locked cabinets for drugs (with secret compartments inside of them!), file slots, and so many other different drawers that I think it took me twenty minutes to explore every one of them. I was mesmerized.

Wouldn’t it be great to some day move to a fancy-schmancy smallish New England town and open up a scrapbook store? It wouldn’t be like today’s specialty scrapbook stores. Oh, no. It would be in a nice (but antiquey) store front not unlike The Shop Around the Corner from You’ve Got Mail. Apothecary tables, cabinets with hidden drawers, and all sorts of book cases and such would line the walls. And there would be some nice, heavy, dining room tables in the middle of the shop for you to work on layouts or artwork or rummage about.

The rummaging would be important because the rest of the store would be…well, anti-Superstore is about as best as I can describe it. Or, as my sister put it while we were daydreaming on the phone, “It wouldn’t be about the packaging of the materials. The shop itself would be the packaging.” In fact, I think she called it my Apothe-Scrap-acary. Nowadays, packaging is everything. Beads come in vials that look like nail polish, ribbons come done up like flowers inside shoe boxes of plastic. It’s artsy, but it’s wasteful. It’s wasteful because we don’t need to use half of that tonnage of plastic to sell a quarter yard of lace. Or four sparkly charms. It’s wasteful of the consumer’s money in a market that is already known for its ridiculousmark-up. My shop would have card catalogue drawers full of beads. Find what you want, pay by the bead. I’ll give you a seal-able slip of a baggie. Map drawers would house papers, sorted first by color, then by designer. (Hey, I love me some organization, too. We don’t need to get crazy to have fun.) Jars would hold buttons, baskets would hold lace. Find something that looks interesting, take it to a table, and – rummage.

It would have an antiquey feel, something that would glow with lamps and soft lights and catch the perfect late-afternoon rays of summer sunlight. I want the atmosphere to be Grandma’s attic, meets antique mall, meets Windsor Buttons (a craft store we frequented as a children – remind me to tell you the story sometime). It would be great.

So great, in fact, that I think there just might be an out of the way entrance into the shop next door, which is actually a room full of long wooden tables, comfy over-sized chairs, and much better lighting. The windows to the street are bigger, with richer, drapier curtains and…could it be window seats up there by the counter? Yes, I think so. But what is a room full of tables doing in this charming shops district? Ah. That’s because it’s a coffee house that opens into the next shop. (I might have to own all three. Tough times, this economy.) This next shop is a book shop very much like Shop Around the Corner, except it’s not just a children’s book store. It’s an odds-and-ends bookstore with current bestsellers, lots of classics, a healthy smattering of interesting non-fiction, and – of course – more than your usual volume of children’s stories. Patrons from the two end shops – my scrapbook store and the bookstore – mingle in and out of the coffee shop. Old men play chess at one of the tables, women sit and work on scrapbook  layouts at another (carefully not spilling their lattes), and singles and couples mingle in and around the other tables.

That is the kind of place I would love to work in all week…and get lost in on a Saturday afternoon. That’s where I’ll be in my mind all day, instead of here.

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Tags: Coffee shop, daydreaming, dream job, scrapbooking, work