In the late spring and early summer of 1995, I was pretty much in despair. My long-time girlfriend and I had suffered a wrenching break-up. Our time together had been tumultuous, manic highs, depressing lows, all-consuming. Now I found myself adrift, with nothing to occupy my days except obsessive thoughts of what was lost. To have something to do, I began to go to yard sales . I lived outside of Springfield, Missouri, and during the warmer months, Springfield was (probably still is) infested with yard sales. Sometimes there are two or three to a block. Sometimes a whole street or sub-division puts one on. I usually went to work at eleven or twelve, so in the morning, when most of the yard sale action takes place, I was free to roam. (I should qualify that we're talking about Fridays, Saturdays, and (some sales) Sundays. No sales on other days.) There wasn't really anything I was looking to buy. I just bought little stuff. I bought army soldiers (plastic----Springfield was too poor for people to have lead soldiers) and cowboys and Indians and little animal figurines. I bought caketoppers and beads and glitter and aquarium castles and hair curlers and McDonald's giveaways. I hardly ever spent more than five dollars in any one place. I would go to a sale, walk through, grab what I wanted to buy, and leave, and throw the stuff in the back of my car and drive down the block until I found the next sale. I knew this writer couple, Leland and Crystal Payton, who made their living collecting things and then writing about their collections. One day I asked them how it was that they could buy all that stuff, like printed 50 printed tablecloths, each one with the map of a different state. I'm not sure they had a big secret, but really, if you want to assemble a collection and you're in a hurrry, you train yourself to only look for that one thing, and you keep your eyes (and your feet) moving. Usually, when you're at an antique show, it's easy to tell the the professionals from the tourists---the professionals are purposeful and engaged; the tourists are moving about like flies in molasses. I rarely spent more than five minutes at any given yard sale. I didn't really have any reason to be in a hurry---I just was. One Saturday when I had the day off I decided to see just how many yard sales I could get to in a day's time. All day, I went at my normal pace, but I never stopped for lunch (I never stop for lunch when I'm buying photos either) and I stayed out late, until almost dusk, probably. I hit 82 yard sales that day. One day back at my house I looked at all this stuff I'd bought (I probably have enough army soldiers to refight WWII) and realized that I had fifty or sixty pairs of animals, lions, tigers, kangaroos, bears, deer, dogs, cats, what have you. I suppose I thought of Noah's Ark. And then one day at a sale I found this little house thing, and I thought to myself, "that looks like the house that was on top of Noah's Ark." And it was more or less just at that moment that I thought, "I should build myself a Noah's Ark." Of course I didn't do it. I told my mother about my idea, and she said it sounded good, but she always says stuff like that. What I wanted to do was build an Ark that was a little more impressive, a little more complete, than the ones that I found in antique stores and craft malls. They would be little dinky things, with maybe ten or twelve sets of animals. But the real Ark (the Biblical Ark, anyway) was this ginormous boat with hundreds and hundreds (okay, thousands and thousands) of sets of animals. I wanted something closer to that. As the years went by, I talked a bit about the Ark, but did nothing. Then, as the years went by and I got in to buying photographs more and more, I started going to the bigger antique shows. I would see these little buildings (log cabins, a wishing well, an old farmhouse, a church, a barn or stable kind of thing) and I started buying those too. I remembered that in the Bible it says, "In my Father's House there are many mansions," so I decided that I would have a bunch of houses on the deck of my Ark. No one really knows what the deck of Noah's Ark looked like anyway. This little blue horse is an example of the kind of animals I bought when I went to those yard sales out in Springfield, Missouri.

I picked up one of these $4.99 plastic tablecloths from Target recently. I really don't like using plastic tablecloths, but i loved the print and figured I could make something out of it. With just a sewing and stick on velcro they became re-useable treat bags for my son's class.