The Kikusui Green Checkers Tea Set

 Piggy backing off of yesterday's blog, I started thinking about when I really started my antiques and vintage collecting. It was somewhere around 1987 when I bought my first item at an antiques store.  It was in Wingate, NC.  The owners of the shop were a couple.  I remember that her first name was Bonnie.  But that's all I remember.  I don't even remember the name of the shop, just that it was in a big old house off of 74 in Wingate.  Actually the house was the childhood home of my Great Aunt Billie's 2nd husband, Bruce Hinson.  The home is historically called the Dickson-Goodwin House and is now a museum to Jesse Helms.  Ah, well.

Anyway, we went to the shop many times.  Mom and formed a friendship with Bonnie while Mom was handling Aunt Sara's estate.  Bonnie appraised the contents of the house for her.  I remember the first time Mom took me to the shop how amazed I was.  I hadn't really been in a shop like that yet.  There would be many more in my future!  The house itself was well preserved and very large.  As I made my way through the rooms, I came into the dining room and saw the tea set.  I immediately fell in love with it.  Green is my favorite color after all.

Of course I asked Mom to buy it for me, but alas, no.  It was somewhere around $60.  That's a lot of money for me today, much less 30 plus years ago.  I didn't make much of a fuss about it but Bonnie knew how interested in it I was.  Every time we would go to her shop, I would spend most of my time looking at it.  I would pick up each piece and examine it.  I loved it.  And there would always be this nervous apprehension that one day I would turn the corner into the dining room and it wouldn't be there.  Someone else had bought it out from under me but thankfully that never happened.

Well, after about 6 months of obsessing over it, Bonnie offered it to me for $20.00.  Yes, that was an incredible buy.  And I had been saving my money to buy it at the original price, so the $20 was no problem.  But I know she did it because she wanted to encourage my love love all things antique and vintage.  And she did.  I wish we had kept up better as I would love to talk to her again and tell her how much that meant to me.

So ends today's episode of Around The House.

That is all.