Oldies but Goodies

My home has crooked floors, drafty windows, antique dishes, and a bed that doesn't even fit a standard mattress. I wouldn't have it any other way.

- JEAN HANFF KORELITZ

IT STARTED WITH BOTTLES, old ones mixed with broken bits of wood and rusty metal and submerged in dirt on a slope behind our house in Westchester, New York. My parents bought the place in the mid-1960s, when I was 6. It was a weekend escape from Manhattan, where my father was already a physician and my mother was not yet a therapist. The home was a 19th-century saltbox-small, dark, and cozy, with a living room and a kitchen downstairs and three bedrooms above. As with many very old houses, the tenants who predated garbage collection had merely thrown their refuse out back. I'm not sure who thought it was a good idea for my dad and me to take up digging around in all that, but weekend after weekend we were out there with shovels, liberating those bottles from the mess. Clear, bubbled glass imprinted with labels like "Citrate of Magnesium." The ones that had somehow survived intact came back inside with us and began to fill up a curious piece of Victorian furniture known as a whatnot, defined by Merriam-Webster as "a light, open set of shelves for bric-a-brac." To my mother, the resurrected bottles didn't even count as bric-a-brac. She tolerated the collection for our sake, but she was mystified by this elevation of junk.