This little sweetie is one of my most prized possessions. I won this Sweet Tooth candy dish on Ebay last March, after spotting something similar in the pages of Domino magazine years before. I searched every flea market stall, Etsy vintage shop, and dusty antique purveyor I happened upon, and finally my hard work paid off. One of the best things about finding once treasured cast-offs like this—besides the sweet, sweet victory—is imagining the life the object had before landing in my covetous hands.
Did it once reside on the desk of a dentist with a wry sense of humor? Though surely not filled with sugar rewards, but more likely, those cheap tin rings they used to hand out to kids for good behavior. Or did it ever corral the loose brown pennies on an old granny's dresser top? I can also imagine a young boy stashing all of his most important artifacts inside the tooth's cavity; flat rocks, rusty bottle caps, spiked jacks, sticky wooden ice cream spoons—because you never know when one of those might come in handy—and that superball he fished out of the neighbor's pool drain, found floating next to a dead frog.
Come to think of it, I'm not sure I ever washed it out...
- Cathleen
