Well, sort of. It was sitting on the sidewalk across the street with the trash, but I choose to believe the fact that it wasn't in a trash bag was a sign that whoever put it out there wanted someone to adopt it and love it.
I thought it was a hat box and was going to use it to store some of Baby Razor's increasingly out of control toy collection, but no: it's a vintage American Tourister hard-shell suitcase, exactly like this one on sale at Etsy. It's a little dirty, and the inside smells like grandma, but I think I can clean it up and use it for something cool. Heck, I can even use it as god intended: as the world's most badass carry-on.
I almost didn't grab it. Partly because, while I am an experienced curb shopper, it feels weird to do it in suburbia where everyone can look out their window and see you taking someone else's trash. And partly because I now have a nagging voice in the back of my head going beeeeeeedbuuuuuuuugs. Stupid bedbugs.
But my armchair is next to the front window, and the suitcase was right in my line of vision this morning, calling to me. You know they crush garbage, right? it said. I'm just saying. That'll be on you. Yeah, for some reason vintage luggage sounds a lot like my mother.
Why was it out there? Well, there have been a lot of people stopping by the house across the street this week, poking around and cleaning, so I'm choosing to believe that the elderly woman who lived there went to an assisted living facility. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
So, does anyone have tips on getting old-lady smell out of fabric? Or cleaning hard luggage (I'm guessing just scrub the crap out of it with soap & water. It looks built to withstand a nuclear bomb, after all.) And can anyone tell me what this mark, to the right of the American Tourister logo, is:
Monogram? Business name? Other?
It's totally adorable. It reminds me of the luggage set that my mom had in the seventies. Hers was a lemon yellow.
ReplyDeleteBaking powder is supposed to get a lot of smells out of things... maybe put some baking powder in a mesh bag (like the kind that really nice underwear comes in) and put it in the luggage for a while?
ReplyDeleteOr maybe do the same thing with some coffee beans... for some reason, coffee beans get rid of bad smells (which is why I used to put coffee grounds in the garbage during our diaper days... I'd make coffee and not drink it, just to have the grounds to make the garbage smell good... nothing like having an infant in an apartment and needing to go down a few flights of stairs and back into the creepy alley to get rid of your trash...)
That luggage does totally rock. And you can't smell the old lady smell in the picture ;-)