Twice a week, after visiting my mother-in-law at the long term care facility where she now resides, we stop in at a nearby north Toronto thrift store. While my husband, being a man, checks out the electronics and science fiction, I browse … everything else.
I like thrifting: it’s a lot like foraging or beach-combing, and an hour spent browsing idly in a thrift store is an hour not spent worrying about the state of the world. After having death-cleaned both our parents’ homes, and having become increasingly mindful of our own propensity to accumulate clutter, we try to be careful about what we bring home. Our first stop at the thrift store is usually the donation bin, where we drop off things we no longer need. And a question we ask of any object before putting it in the cart is: “Does this add to our life?”
A good example is this Wood & Sons ‘Holly Cottage’ teapot, which made it into the cart about a month ago. It most definitely adds to our life even though it cost about $10 and I have not yet used it for tea. 
Is it not delightful?
Today’s treasures included two dresses, a set of brightly painted wooden fish napkin holders, two unusual pendants, and a copy of horticultural historian Judyth A. McLeod’s In a Unicorn’s Garden: Recreating the mystery and magic of medieval gardens (Murdoch, 2009).
I love these vintage (?) jade-chip pendants so much.
I don’t even use napkin rings, but do, of course, have fish-themed dinnerware and will definitely deploy these as table decor.
I have donated many of my practical gardening books to the little library down the street, but love scholarly works on horticulture. This book, whose title draws on the mythos of unicorns in medieval art and fable, is copiously illustrated and looks like a cracker. It definitely adds to our life.
As anyone can see, today’s thrifted finds unquestionably add to our life. If one ascribes, as I try to, to the advice often attributed to William Morris—to “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”—these items exemplify the latter.
Not pictured, but useful: some electronic doo-dad my husband found among the old computer monitors and disused printers.
P.S. The green velvet chair in the first picture is also a thrift find (for $15!), from late last year.