Curious Curios

There are magical places we return to again and again, and if we’re lucky, 1) they’re a store; 2) they’re relatively close by so we can drop in when we choose; and 3) they’re owned by a person we both like and admire.

I’ve written about one such store: my friend Joanne Rossman’s eponymous shop on Birch Street in Roslindale, Massachusetts. Today, I feel compelled to write about another called simply Nesting. Located in Concord (one of my all-time favorite Massachusetts towns where the ghosts rule), Nesting is up a steep, weather-beaten staircase on the second floor of a tipsy brick building.

The owner of Nesting, Wendy Snider, seems part angel, part sprite, and maybe like Joanne, there’s a little witch thrown in for good measure. All I can say is that her store makes me so happy I could believe in almost anything. There is such vivid imagination at work here that fires up my imagination, and the result is a conviction that anything I truly want and believe in is possible.

The magic is like most magic…hard to pin down. It may be Wendy’s sweet dog, Willow, at the door; it may be the old stuff like typewriters and paper and rusty birds and tiny chunks of soap and haunted photographs and all sorts of quirky what-not. It may be the climb up those stairs and the old, crooked building, the way the floor slopes and slants, the warren of drifty rooms. It may be the fragrance of yellowed paper and lavender bundles and old books and even older walls.

I only know that when I step gingerly around Willow and over the threshold, I am transported. Maybe we all feel that way when we come face to face with beauty and freshness and the power of originality. It could be anywhere: the produce arrangement at a farm stand; the bustling kitchen of a favorite restaurant; the rickety, listing foyer of a friend’s old house by the sea.

But here, at Nesting, it’s the colors, mostly muted and earthy; it’s the displays of bare branches and birds’ nests and linen and inkwells and threadbare lampshades; it’s the old building; it’s Concord where the past is as real as the present. But fundamentally, it’s another prime example of an inspired imagination at work. All I can do is hold my fragrant lavender bunch and whisper, “Thank you.”