License to ... Collect

All thoughts of hoarding and cluttering are top of mind these days with my mother's big Downsize / Please Take This Off My Hands Sale just a week away.

I've learned this collecting disease does NOT skip a generation... as evidenced by one of the walls in Carter's basement Man Cave.

His habit started innocent enough. But I am to blame, I'm sure, because he wouldn't have been at a flea market years ago unless I took him there, right? So he picked out the cool yellow and red flamed smiley face one and then choose a Man Cave and Budweiser one for Daddy. Then, well, it just went into full gear!

He found a few "real" ones a different time at that flea market, then discovered there is an endless supply at the Iola Old Car Show. Of course, the treasured find – gift from his Grandma Hedberg actually – are the old plates up top representing the years my parents were born: 1927 and 1932. There also is a 1949 one, the year they got married, and a Wisconsin 1963 for Jim's year of birth. I don't think he has one for my year, which, for the record, was NOT from a Model T!

He's also received a few as gifts and now has more than half the states.

Our friend Tamara, one of Carter's first "girlfriends," sent him some from Indiana and Montana a few years back after she moved with her husband from Indianapolis to her homeland of Montana. She asked recently if he minded "duplicates." Not at all, I said. No two are exactly the same.

The one he got from her in the mail yesterday – as an early birthday present – is different than his other Big Sky plate. So that's cool. And now he started a new row, which obviously has to be filled at some point. We know that if he goes back to the car show, he could wrap it up in one final purchase. But what's the fun in that?

Besides, if he gets every state and fills the wall, what will he start collecting next? A car for each plate?

Let's not encourage him. Perhaps it's not too late to break the cycle.

Oh ha. That's a good one.