Finding Beauty in a Thrift Store
How a great tragedy inspired my love of rescuing old things and making my home beautiful
There is a fortune I have gotten no less than six times — one tucked away in fortune cookies that keeps making reappearances in my life again and again. “You find beauty where others see nothing unusual,” it reads.
Finding beauty in a thrift store isn’t always easy. There are piles of junk and strange smells. Empty soda bottles are priced at $5 for some inexplicable reason and the thing you want the most is almost always broken beyond repair. But then some days, you notice an old, weathered pot in a sea of gently-used garden hoses and all you see is the beauty. “Ah, would you just look at that patina,” you think.
Finding beauty in a life isn’t always easy, either. To further explain that, I need to let you in on something about which I don’t often open up, so here goes: My life has taken place under the shadow of a very tragic moment.
When I was two months old, my mom was shot in the head.
The shooting happened while she, my grandmother, and I were driving to the library. My grandmother was driving, my mom was in the passenger seat, and I was in my mom’s arms.
The gunman was my mom’s estranged husband. A few weeks prior, she had left him, and gotten a restraining order ahead of filing for divorce. But he wouldn’t let up, calling her and threatening her, even obtaining a gun despite the restraining order.
On that day in March, he was waiting as our car neared a stop sign. And as we came to a crawl, he got out of his own car, and raised his arm.
“Put the baby down,” my grandmother told my mom when she spotted the gun.
He fired and missed. But he fired again, and the second shot was good, landing in the right side of my mom’s temple. Tires squealed. The baby, now covered in blood, cried. My grandmother, in shock, managed to grab me and run to the nearest house, screaming for an ambulance.
My mom survived. Still, she was never the same. She lost her right eye, her sinus cavity (and therefore, her sense of smell and taste), her teeth, much of her memory, and suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury that led to many changes in her behavior and personality.
In many ways, my mom became Benjamin Button — shot at 20 years old, born anew as someone closer to the age of 12.
In the years since, she has undergone no fewer than two dozen surgeries and medical procedures. She had a plate installed in her head, an operation to move a nerve from her nose to her head, another operation to graft skin over the part of her face where the nerve was moved. She suffers seizures that at one point caused her to fall and break her wrist in two places. She sees so many specialists, from neurologists to pain management physicians, I often have trouble keeping track.
Following her recovery in North Georgia, and the legalities of it all, the three of us moved to Florida. We built a house and started a new life: me, my grandmother (who became my mom), and my mom (who became much more like a younger sister to me, as eventually I grew older than she is, mentally).
Despite this awful thing having happened, my life was really and truly beautiful and amazing. And that’s because my grandmother made it that way.
At just 40 years old, she saw her daughter nearly die and had to alter her entire life to accommodate this new baby — me — becoming a mom (again) at a time when she had been happily adjusting to life on her own. At the time of the shooting, my grandmother was single (married twice, divorced twice) and owned a clothing boutique with her best friend. Her two adult kids were freshly out of the house — she was focused on traveling and doing all the things she never could before, as a young mom.
Then, her daughter got shot, and everything changed.
The life she had just started to enjoy had to be left behind so that she, my mom, and I could start fresh. And start fresh we did.
In Florida, we moved to a private golf community where we were surrounded by nuclear families: moms, dads, siblings, Golden Retrievers. And then here came us just one house over — this motley trio. Well-worn stuffed animals that were patched and sewn together to look like the shiny new toys next door, but you could always tell the difference.
My grandmother worked incredibly hard to ensure life stayed beautiful and a huge part of that was in how she decorated our home. There were sculptures standing on plinths in the corners, oversized antique armoires that offered the perfect hiding spots during a game of sardines with my friends, and even a hand-painted mural covering all four walls of the playroom.
When my friends came over (mine was the “fun house,” because there was never some annoying man around), she would fill the dining table with vintage wooden bird houses, and teach us how to decoupage them with magazine cutouts. One day, when a friend and I didn’t get in to Space Camp, she built a giant rocket ship out of old pieces of cardboard, and placed blankets and pizza inside so we could have our own version of camp.
She didn’t have the husband with a cushy finance job that many of her friends and neighbors did, but what she did have was wherewithal, creativity — and a talent for shopping.
I’ve touched on this in the newsletter in the past but so often, when it comes to the hobbies and talents of women, we call them frivolous. “Oh, you’re good at home decorating? Or scrapbooking? How cute.” Traditionally feminine pursuits are seen as unskilled, while many male interests (model train making, baseball card collecting) are viewed as somehow more intellectual — something that makes one smarter, or stronger, or somehow more well-rounded.
But the kind of talent my grandmother had for shopping and decorating a home was truly that — a talent, marked by an ability to suss out the homes that were undergoing renovations, so she could be sure and drive by the night before trash day and get first dibs of any of the old furniture left out on the curb. Or an ability to place the winning bid on a container of lost-in-transit furniture — one full of high-end pieces on their way to New York — and sell them by-the-piece to all the women in the neighborhood, netting a five-figure profit in less than a day, and launching a business that she continued until her death in 2019.
And that brings me to the day my world shifted for the second time. It was 2019 when my grandmother was driving to work — to her store that she launched all those years ago with her neighborhood container sales — and she was rear-ended. What seemed, according to the police officer that responded, to be a run-of-the-mill car accident became something else entirely when she started complaining of chest pains.
She was taken by ambulance to the hospital and then, by life flight, to the trauma center. I was notified while she was in the air and drove so fast that I arrived before she did.
The next few hours were the worst of my life. I was taken to a small waiting room, where a hospital chaplain came in and sat down with me.
Next, a surgeon came in the room and shut the door behind him. That moment was when I knew, that click of the door a sure sign that he didn’t want anyone outside to hear the wailing that was about to come out of my body.
“Your grandmother isn’t well. She isn’t going to make it.”
So, I had a neighbor drive my mom to the hospital to say our goodbyes. Hospital staff led us to a room where my grandmother was laying in a bed, covered head to toe in white sheets so we couldn’t see the bruises and the marks from where they tried to resuscitate her.
The last thing I told her was, “I love you, and I promise I’ll take care of mom.”
Then, just like the movies, there was a long beep and then…. silence.
My mom moved into the house the next morning and I’ve taken care of her ever since. With no siblings and no close relatives, I am all she has.
But man, oh man. Is it ever hard to take care of a now-60-year-old woman with a Traumatic Brain Injury and dozens of accompanying health issues.
Some days feel impossible.
Other days — like when we sit down to dinner and I notice she’s accidentally put her prosthetic eye in upside-down — feel like a dark sitcom. You laugh to keep from crying and because what else can you do? How can you not find the hilarity in someone putting their eye in upside down? Trust me when I tell you my mom laughs at this, too.
My life shifted in many ways five years ago. I went from being a single-income woman with no kids and no real responsibilities (other than myself and my mortgage) to a single-income woman who needed to financially and emotionally and physically support another human being — one with myriad physical and psychological health issues.
At the time of my grandmother’s death, I was working as a magazine editor, making a very meager salary. My antique and art sales were secondary income but that was just “fun” money — I could use it to buy a handbag, or fund a trip, but it wasn’t something I relied on.
When my mom moved in, everything changed. Suddenly, the dreams I had before (twice-a-year international trips! a big house and a luxury car!) were replaced by much humbler ideals (like making enough money to support two people! and finding privacy! oh god — privacy!)
Caregiving requires sacrifice. The years I have spent taking care of my mom are the same ones I might have, in another life, spent taking care of a child. It is a very strange thing to take care of someone knowing that, when the time comes, there might not be anyone who can take care of me.
Lest we veer too far into “woe is me” territory, it’s important to note that my mom moving in with me served as a positive catalyst — it was the driving force behind my desire to be successful and financially capable.
The months after I became her caregiver, I became incredibly serious about both making money and investing it. I focused more intently on my art and antique sales, thereby tripling my income in under ten months.
And one day, while reading an article about “unique ways to invest your money,” I realized something that changed my life forever: one place in which I needed to start investing, was myself.
This article mentioned that, if you had a niche skill, you should invest into marketing that skill and teaching others how to do it, too. And something clicked. I have a niche skill, I thought. I am insanely good at shopping at thrift stores.
We women don’t see shopping as a marketable skill, but indeed it is. There’s an art and a science to the research, the trend-spotting, and the care that goes into it. And so, I decided to write a book about it. I invested $1,000 into hiring a graphic designer I found online to create a short little book.
Maybe this could be an e-book, I thought. But then, I got back the finished product and felt like maybe, just maybe, it could be more.
So I spent weeks researching publishing houses and editors, eventually sending my little proposal to half a dozen or so.
And I got responses. Despite having no publicist and no agent, I got a book deal. And then the book landed in places like Target, and Wal-Mart and Barnes & Noble… and suddenly, I was being paid to talk about the book, and teach others about thrift-shopping, and go on tv and speak to publications like The Economist.
All because I’m good at shopping.
All because my grandmother taught me how to be good at shopping, and how to find beauty in a thrift store. And what’s more — how to bring that beauty back home.
University of Kentucky gerontology professor Graham Rowles once told US News & World Report that there is “pretty strong evidence that the environment in which people live is closely linked to their well-being.” The human attachment to home, Rowles added, is linked closely to that of an animal’s attachment to their territory. In other words, the desire to make our homes beautiful is quite literally “built into our DNA."
That the need to make our homes beautiful is baked into who we are is no surprise, but it’s about more than that, isn’t it? As an adult, I can look back and see so clearly that my grandmother’s talent for finding beauty in strange places was a means not just of instinct, or even of escape — but of acceptance.
Accepting that life is sometimes awful and brutal and it can be a complete mess.
But would you just look at all that patina?
You had me laughing and crying the whole way through. PLEASE write a memoir.
Virginia, this essay is stunningly beautiful. Thank you for sharing.