New England for many outside the region is analogous (=) with antiques, and New England -- New Hampshire included -- does its best to help foster that image by putting an antique shop every 50 yards, nestled in between Dunkin Donuts and Walmart. If you're in some of the trendier tourist-focused parts of New Hampshire like the Lakes region or Portsmouth and the coast, you'd be hard-pressed to be able to throw a stone in any direction without hitting an antiques shop. Now, that's part of the New Hampshire charm, so I'm not complaining and indeed, it's fun to walk Portsmouth's winding 17th century streets and explore the many little shops and boutiques and art studios, but still, I am issuing a word to the wise.
A couple years back, a fad of collecting colonial-style antique New England-ish colored glass bottles swept New Hampshire, and many shops loaded up on these things, some with a very rustic, rough-hewn twine tied around the bottle neck for convenient hanging in a window. Now, there are professional collectors out there, but these colored bottles suddenly popped up all over Portsmouth. These things just oozed old New England and seeing them hanging and reflecting the sun in wooden-grilled windows immediately invokes sentimental images of the rural New England childhood you never had. One can only wonder if the Chinese workers who manufactured those bottles felt any tinge of New England nostalgia either.....
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