sueeeus

Last night I dreamt that my mom gave me a gift, and with it the normal commentary that she had intended to make something, but found this (undoubtedly thrifting or yard saleing) and couldn’t pass it up because it was so much nicer than what she could have come up with on her own.  It was a handbag.  A purse, and of course we all know that I am nuts for purses.  So.  She gives me this purse.  It’s made of an assortment of fine materials and she’s pointing out the various rarities and identifying them.  The purse had a partially wooden structure, and the one visible flaw was that the side piece and the front piece didn’t fit quite smoothly together, but it was something that could likely be easily fixed.  I turned it around and there was a pinkish shimmery leathery part on the base.  This, she explained, was a rare pink alligator skin, or something like that.  She was excited about it and turned it inside and out, showing me different things about it, telling me the exotic woods and materials it was made from, and for some reason, and this I don’t recall, but it made sense at the time (in the sense that it was something she would do, explain it as she did it, do it, and then not be able to undo it because she went too far), she clipped the corners off.  Swiftly, deftly.  Snip, snip, snip, snip.  There, that’s better, she showed me triumphantly.   And she was still going on about what a find it was and imagining it’s value, because she had an eye for this sort of thing…  …and then…  a piece of paper, like a postcard, slipped out and she picked it up, and it was a valuation sheet.  It had the purchase price and an appraiser’s price.  It had been overlooked until now.  This bag had made it through the thrift store/yard sale circuit, into my mother’s hands, without the tag.  A true find.  The stuff of Antiques Road Show dreams.  It said $1,000,000 for the original price, and $255,000 for the appraised price.  It had lost quite a bit of value in its life, but nonetheless, this proved that it was indeed an item of value.  Either way, it was a LOT, since she’d gotten it for almost nothing (under $5).  There was anguish as she realized what she had done, because that quick little snip snip had decimated its value.  The dream ended with me telling her not to worry about it, that I’d very very carefully hand sew the pieces back.