As I’ve mentioned before, we keep a booth at the Peddlers Mall in Lebanon, Ohio. It’s a little space where I get to share my love for vintage, quirky, and affordable treasures. Every week I stop in to tidy up, rearrange things, pull old inventory, and restock with new finds—usually small items priced anywhere from a couple of bucks to about $50. It’s perfect for things that might not make it to our eBay store or website (because let's be real—some pieces are just too fiddly to ship or too niche to list online).
On a recent visit, I brought along my six-year-old granddaughter. Now this girl is a collector in training. She loves figurines, old stuff, weird stuff, kitschy stuff—basically anything that would’ve caught my eye at her age. She's following right in my footsteps, and I love every second of it.
Her mom (my daughter), however? Not so much. She's not a collector, not a fan of clutter, and definitely not on board with tiny ceramic anything. So when my granddaughter begs to bring home "just one more little thing," it drives her mom a little bonkers. Which, of course, I find endlessly amusing.
As we were wrapping up for the day, I snapped a few pictures of the booth and was starting to pack up. That’s when my granddaughter asked if she could take some pictures. I handed her my phone without hesitation—and what she captured made me smile.
She went straight for our shelf of religious figurines: angels, cherubs, Jesus figures, and the like. She called them “pictures of Jesus and God” and made sure to get several angles. You can tell where her focus was—on the gentle faces, the serene postures, the golden wings.
I couldn’t stop smiling as I looked through them. Something about seeing our booth through her eyes—through the lens of a little girl—reminded me why I love doing this in the first place.
The booth isn’t just a business. It’s memories, stories, and sometimes… a sweet moment captured by a tiny photographer with a big heart.
