This is Rumbel Strip, America Heilman.

The Museum of Everyday Life lives inside of each of us.

A vast and echoing cabinet of curiosities.

Every minute of every day filling our endless drawers and cases

with new additions to the permanent collection.

A gift from a lover, a family heirloom, a note, a paper clip, a pocket knife, a picture frame. The first time I went to the museum, it was by accident with my friend Larry. We drove by an old dairy barn in the northeast kingdom of Vermont and hand painted on the side it said the museum of everyday life

It would have been easy to miss. It's not the sort of road where you stop.

But we turned around and we went back. There was a sign outside that said to turn on the

lights and then to turn them off when you leave, But no one was there and the lights didn't work, so we went through the barn with Larry's Bick lighter. A visual history of the safety pin. That was the exhibit. Medieval safety pins displayed on tiny shelves, pictures and histories of body piercings,

a loving text about Walter Hunt, the inventor of the modern day safety pin. There was a kind of reenactment of the

murder of an Athenian soldier, a death by cloak pins, which involved a bloody sheet and

blood-spattered walls.

It was a totally homemade exhibit about an everyday object

in an unheated, unsupervised dairy barn on Route 16.

Also, there was a giant stuffed bear.

Soon after that, I called Claire Dolan,

the maker of this museum.

Claire spent a good part of her life up the road in Glover living and working at

Bread and Poppet Theatre before buying an old farmhouse and starting her own museum.

I went back and talked with her and I've been talking with her ever since.

This year's exhibit is about bells and whistles.

Here's Claire Dolan.

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