McKinney Trade Days

10.19.13

    Up in one of the suburbs of Dallas is a town called McKinney, and it was listed as one of the top growing cities in some poll last year so there are all these houses going up on every other corner. However, McKinney has one "small town" tradition that I love- and that's McKinney Trade Days.

   Alex and I love to thrift shop- we love garage sales, craigslist, and trade shows. I have never really been into that kind of stuff, but when Alex and I first started dating he would wake me up at 7AM on a Saturday and say, "Are you ready? We gotta go garage sale-ing today." There's even an app for that (believe it). So off we'd go and Alex would find the most random things at really good prices. At first I'd just ride with him, but eventually I started getting out and going with him to look at things, just to look. We've told this story to his family and they're so funny because they always tell him, "That's just like your dad!" Alex's dad was an auctioneer in Midland, and he was always looking for the next great deal that couldn't be passed up. As you can imagine, Alex got pretty dang excited about going to the McKinney trade days since it only happens once a month and we had never been able to get it together and make it out there.

    We strolled up and down the isles of the flea market, joking about how some of the people out there just emptied out their house in their booth and called it "vintage". I need to mention that my best friend Jenny also enjoys a good deal, and she has reclaimed some furniture (with the help of Chad's muscles!) that look completely professional. So of course, I am taking pictures of the really odd things and sending it to her (like the guy that had about 1,000 different door knobs... I don't know how you get that many door knobs).

    As we walked down one of the isles, there was a permanent booth set up with these large pieces of artwork on the outside. They were really unique and I knew I liked them, but I figured they were probably really expensive so we kept walking. After about 10 minutes, I told Alex that I wanted to go back and look at those pieces and just see how expensive they were. As we entered the booth, we looked around and started getting an idea of what all the artist was about. She would take pictures, any pictures, and turn them in to these large wooden pieces that somewhat resembled canvas prints, but the images were somehow permanently sealed into the wood so that they would never be ruined by rain or start to smudge if you didn't handle them correctly. There were so many different aspects of the art: somebody had a piece made that was in honor of a grandparent that had passed away, so 4-5 pictures of the person were made into what could have been a page out of a scrapbook; the artist had done some generic pieces that were just a pretty background with a Bible verse; and she had also taken her wedding pictures and made pieces out of them. We decided to just get a price from her to see how much it would be to get a picture of Kaitlyn made (the one at the top of this page with us holding her sweet little feet and our wedding rings on her toes, along with the Bible verse).

    The artist's name is Lisa, and as we stood in line to talk to her we glimpsed down at her pricing that was out on the table and decided that was definitely something we wanted to do. Alex took out his phone and showed her the picture that we wanted to use, and all she said was, "Oh she's just beautiful." She didn't know our story, but I took that opportunity to just start crying nearly uncontrollably. Lisa looked from me to Alex to the phone and back to Alex with a "what did I say?" look. I told her that we had a stillbirth, and this was our daughter. Lisa gave me a big hug and told us how sorry she was for our loss, and then we finished up our conversation with Alex sending her the picture over email. Later that day, I wrote to Lisa and apologized for having a come-apart in her booth, and shared the link to this blog with her so that she could read our story and know what all we'd been through.

      The following Monday, Lisa called me and told me that she had also experienced a loss with twins at 5 months along. She told me what an amazing story she thought ours was, and she thanked us for coming into her booth. Then she told me that she thought there were others who had come into her booth for similar reasons and that she wanted to make a duplicate of our piece to put up in her permanent exhibit to share Kaitlyn's story.

      Wow. I was beginning to see what God is up to with us.




If you'd like to see Lisa's work, you can find it here.