A rambling antique mall just off the highway, where the third floor smells like cedar and nobody hurries you along.
The sign promised three floors and forty dealers. What it did not mention was the staircase — narrow, wooden, and creaking in a way that felt less like a warning and more like an invitation.
The first floor is the polite one: furniture in neat rows, a glass case of pocket watches, a woman at the register doing a crossword in pen. The second floor is where it starts to loosen up. Booths run into each other, price tags are handwritten, and someone has arranged sixty table lamps by the color of their shades.
I spent most of an hour up there. There is a particular pleasure in a room full of lamps that are all switched on for no reason other than that they still work.
The third floor is the reason to come. Cedar chests, stacked steamer trunks, a rack of wool coats that nobody has tried on since the sixties. It smells the way old attics smell — dry, warm, faintly sweet.
I came away with a brass desk lamp with a green glass shade and a small dent in the base. Eighteen dollars. It rode home on the passenger seat, seat belt on, like a guest.
Sometimes the long way around is the point.