They skip along the upper rail of the Jenny Lind black-spindled DaVinci crib. Soft pine meets sore gums. Once more when I passed it this morning, I couldn’t bring myself to erase them with mother’s magic, a black Sharpie.
They’re behind my why, the reason I love what I love and lean so hard into trying to live the fully orbed life that creates beauty around faith, family, friendship, work, home and garden and fun adventures like the Juliet Rome space. To give context to it, I put a framed sign there:
Storylines
It’s always fun to know how something comes to be. This space is the happy next step in a grand love affaire with a good patina that started decades ago somewhere in England or Scotland or France. Juliet Rome began as a sort of muse, the inspiration by which I could spill out in a lifestyle blog the thoughts and ideas that matter to me.
This is the next wandering of that muse. Antique and vintage things whisper about other times, places and people, and bring us into their stories. I believe the best life is a patinaed life, the lived-in, little-bit-bruised, open-to-the-sunshine life that echoes experience and understands that a rich man’s wealth is the number of breadcrumbs marking his journey.
I’m happy to bring you into the Juliet Rome story, sharing photos and stories from “rich soil.” Welcome.
There is a four-foot-long antique English copper and brass hunting horn there now. It has a slight ding, the result of our Alex and his cousin Chelsea dropping it from the upper balcony to the stone floor below in their grandparents’ Colorado mountain home. There is some disagreement about who the actual culprit was, but no matter, that is not the full point. As it sounded their capers, it tells a larger story of the great chase of huntsman and hound before foxhunting was banned in England in the early 2000s.
To know each other, we need to know where we come from. Fouchéna’Ché—Fouché—Sheppard is a Charleston-born, native Gullah storyteller, inspirational speaker and award-winning poet I interviewed for the Charleston Metro Chamber for its 250th anniversary commemorative book. In a candid conversation, she shared how the things our children learn at their parents’ knees shape their hearts and minds. Stories can be knives. Stories can be scaffolding.
I’ve told you the story before of an older gentleman client who left a meeting in our conference room dismayed because our young account executive asked few questions. How can she serve me well if she doesn’t want to know me? That has always felt personal to me. I am convicted every time I remember it that to ask too few questions of our loved ones can be construed as neglect.
It is true that we only have the moment we are in. We don’t know the number of our days. It seems also true that how alive we live is tethered to the understanding that we are heirs, connected to a larger story. Heirs to a nation under God. Heirs to generations of family who have built, labored, created, produced.
There are so many ways to sound the horn in a family. Photos. (My father gave me one of my stylish grandmother with him as a baby. It is a picture of the joy of a young mother.) Stories told around a dinner table. Placing and enjoying even just one vintage or antique treasure in even the most modern of our homes. Objets d’art or teethmarks. Breadcrumb trails that help explain who we are and what we love.
