I was in a Goodwill store in 2005, and I bumped elbows with a woman who was putting stuffed animals in her basket.

“Why do you have so many?” I asked.

“This is how I pay for my kids’ shoes. I sell these stuffed animals on eBay.”

Wow! I thought shoes are expensive, and she told me she had five kids.

I could maybe do that. I thought.

Then I went to my favorite thrift store. At the counter where three brand new in the box baby talking Shrek dolls. The movie had just come out. They were $15 each. Well, my husband will kill me if I spend $45 on dolls, I thought, but $15 can’t hurt. So I bought one. Sold it on an eBay auction for $38, and … I was hooked! I went back to get the other two and they were gone. Lesson learned.

So then I got sick and I could barely step over a curb without help. I went to my Doctor but he had left for the day. Right next door was a doll shop that I always wanted to go into, and across the shop was a big banner announcing an auction and the date. I talked to my husband about investing some of our tax refund in dolls that I would sell on eBay. It was a tiny store and we figured it wouldn’t be more than a few hundred dollars.

But at the auction there was a basement as big as a football field with shelves and shelves of dolls. Seven dollhouses on sale; I got one of them. There was a tiny shelf that had 65 miniature statues on it, each one worth $45; I won it for $65! I won hundreds of Nancy Ann Storybook dolls. I won antique dolls and vintage dolls and some of those were Betsy McCall dolls. I won shelf after shelf of dolls. We had to rent a U-Haul! It took 2 truckloads to bring them home. I still have a few of the original auction buys from seventeen years ago. I have bought dolls and miniatures, people have given me dolls and I have traded, but mostly I have sold on eBay and Etsy and now on our website.