Once you’re a certain age, you can let yourself go. I have always wanted to be the crazy old lady in the loud batik caftan who frightens the neighborhood kids away with a walking stick and pronouncements of doom. But not yet. My mom scolds me for wearing shorts that hit above the knee. “You’re going out in that?” I always tell her, “Yes, because I won’t when I’m seventy.” Or maybe I would.
Old houses let themselves go very well. They become downright picturesque.
![Frosted Glass Frosted Glass](http://www.leighreyes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/frostedglass1.jpg)
After my grandaunts died, their clothes stayed in plastic bags, waiting for the living to decide which were mementos and which were rags. I found a dress, crisp with starch and pressed by decades, with an embroidered monogram on the pocket. I have vintage pens with other people’s monograms. There is, undeniably, a thrill in being the first to own a pen manufactured at the turn of the century. Being new old stock, or NOS, can add to a pen’s value. But there is also joy in being the unintended heir of Mary Marjorie Watson, she of the blue plastic pen with the Weidlich no. 2 nib, or Dr. George Collins, who signed his prescriptions with a striated Sheaffer Balance and a medium-to-broad flourish.
![Tibaldi Iride Tibaldi Iride](http://www.leighreyes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/tibaldi-iride3.jpg)
The browns of the Tibaldi Iride and of my grandaunt’s dress seem to like one another. The body is translucent, so I can see the ink level when I hold the pen up to the light. (This also makes for some pretty cool macro shots.)
![Tibaldi Iride Tibaldi Iride, on its side](http://www.leighreyes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/tibaldi-iride1.jpg)
The dress was mended, with microscopic meticulousness, at least twice that I could see. I am not the most careful of people, and snag my clothes on every protruding door knob there is. I cannot help but be amazed by those stitches, how they held (and hold) wear and tear and time at bay. It is the same amazement I feel at holding a pen that still works after a hundred years. Perhaps a century from now someone will hold a pen of mine and feel the same way. “It’s all banged up, but my God, it writes.”
![Tibaldi Iride Tibaldi Iride, fine nib](http://www.leighreyes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/tibaldi-iride4.jpg)