You are wandering the flea market, aimlessly looking at all the junk that people are wasting their Saturday afternoon trying to sell and you realize that the old adage is very much alive: “One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.” As you see people pulling out tens and twenties in exchange for stuff that you would be embarrassed to put a “To give away” sign on in your front lawn, you see it; there it is, a vintage cutting board…this is not any cutting board, it’s a pig shaped vintage cutting board, obviously old; made of a single piece of wood distressed with knife marks, it could certainly tell many stories.
Years ago, when you moved from your parents’ home into your first apartment, having nothing to adorn the walls with and no money to buy anything fun, you decided to hang up a cow shaped wood cutting board that your grandmother had given you as an apartment warming gift; many years and many residences later, you have a collection of vintage cutting boards hanging in your country kitchen.
Today, you are quite picky about what decorates your walls; you are no longer in the same financial situation and you are not simply looking for filler; you seek out quality, unique, vintage cutting boards. Your collection includes many round boards, rectangular boards, some butcher blocks, a flower board, a pizza board, a checker board and now, if the lady in front of you can finally count out the right amount of change to make it to $6, you should be able to add a vintage wood pig cutting board to your collection.
According the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word vintage [1] was initially used to describe the yield of a season’s grapes or wine from a vineyard; today, this word is also used to describe something that has the quality of being old yet having a recognized and enduring interest, often improving with age (sort of what we would like to be able to say about ourselves!) When talking antiquing [2], the word vintage is used to describe items that were made between 1830 and 1930; in car collecting, vintage is used when talking about cars that were manufactured between 1919 and 1930.
As you finally, get to speak to the man selling the vintage cutting board that you yearn for, he tells you how his mother had received the board as a wedding gift, used it like crazy and then hung it on her kitchen wall for many, many years. He never liked pigs so he decided to sell it (along with much other junk, I mean, vintage treasures from his childhood home); he was thrilled to know that the vintage cutting board would be coveted by you as it had been by his mother.
[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vintage
[2] http://www.ehow.com/facts_4911375_what-meaning-word-vintage.html