this gorgeous thing

Cris and I were chatting in my office the other morning about nothing in particular, in that early morning way that people do. After a few minutes I noticed that her eyes kept drifting upward to look at something  above me. Finally I looked around to see what she couldn't stop staring at and was amused to discover she'd found my stamp holder.

I salvaged it from the library garbage a few weeks back, fell in love with it, took pictures of it and had every intention of finding a good home for it.* It's just so pretty, this battered rusty thing, sculptural and delicate as well as practical.  (At some point in its clearly long life it held dozens of library stamps, back before the age of computers and scanners and printers.)

I saw one listed on Etsy not long after salvaging mine, but couldn't quite bring myself to try to sell it, or even find a good home for it -- so it's been lurking on a shelf near the ceiling in my office.

Cris has liberated it from its dust-collecting days in the upper reaches of my office shelves, though, and is determined to decorate and display it somewhere in the library. (Or rather, she's determined, in her ever cheerful and wonderful way, to make the rest of us take turns at decorating it -- about that, we shall see.)

But for now, at least, I'm just glad that someone else found herself as smitten with this ridiculous, gorgeous thing as I am, and that I alone am no longer responsible for keeping it out of the trash.

* Not my home, which I am trying with limited success to empty of things, not to fill with yet even more things.