Bread Crumbs

Welcome

I’ve been scattering little pieces of myself across decades, dwellings, closets, and pages. A trail through DC, through memory, through the people who spoke over me, the ones who spoke to me, and the artifacts that held me up.

Some of you may know me from my almost 20 years as head shop mistress at GoodWood, DC’s longstanding (and still going strong) mercantile. Antique and vintage home décor, a mini department store, and a place I’ll always think of as home. Home to my creativity. Home to my community. Home to my heart.

From GoodWood back in day

It was also where I got comfortable picking up (and trailing) bread crumbs — clues hidden in other people’s gilt mirrors or in a pair of vintage Frye harness boots. Boots Jerry (if you don’t already know him, you will; he may be my most delicious bread crumb of all — no, not a bread crumb, Jerry was an entire feast) swore once belonged to a leather queen he knew.

GoodWood was my lab. A place of alchemy. A place where disparate people and objects could suddenly come together — across cultures, across centuries — and make more sense than they ever had before. Fragments, bits and bobs, flung and forgotten, reordered until they felt whole.

I left four years ago, and everyone asked, What’s next?
This might be it.

Like a fern unfurling in real time, this is a new place to collect and rearrange until I am made whole again.

It won’t be a straight story. It will be fragments: a loft listing that doubles as my autobiography, a monologue that belongs to my play but also to my father, a dress that feels like both armor and confession. Twenty twinkly lamps tucked into a decoupaged built-in, where Jerry once taught us: “It’s atmospherics, baby.”

I call them bread crumbs. Small, ordinary things. But gathered together, they form a path. A way back. A way through.

I don’t promise conclusions here. Only trails.

Follow along. Pick them up. See where they lead.

In the old story the crumbs were eaten by birds — maybe that’s the point, maybe that’s you, and maybe that’s how I get home.