The indulgent patchwork parlor of Shelby Jackson '13 is full of bohemian mystery. A cabaret lamp in the color and shape of a cabbage hangs from a long cable, tinting her room a dim gypsy green. Admiring its scalloped piqu, I'm surprised when she flips off the light to reveal a rather delicate, virginally ivory lampshade. "It's a green light bulb," Shelby explains, settling onto an exercise ball in the middle of her floor.
Other oddities go unexplained: the price tags that remain on all the antiquities even her wall paintings for instance, or the dandelion tattoo on her chest. Flasks and sea glass vases lurk around with no apparent function, while a corked ruby vial serves as a mausoleum for dead ladybugs. "They infested one of the bedrooms in our house, and my sister and I started collecting them," Shelby laughs.
Back at home in a suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Shelby frequents her favorite string of thrift shops, the likes of which she promises you can't find here in Hanover. Paintings, posters and other edge-curling miscellany deck her dorm's walls like an auction-space bookshop. A vintage flip clock on her night stand looks so antique I have to confirm it's really 6:42. A wooden artist's table the height of a possum hosts a slew of paints and brushes, speckled and stained from recent use. This semester, Shelby is taking Drawing 1, an early effort at putting some skills behind her obvious interests. An old camera sits nearby its leather case. She took it from her mom, who probably doesn't know it's missing. Leaning against her father's college pillow silkscreened in rainbows and storm clouds Shelby is, like her dorm, eclectic and collected. A long feather clothespinned to a linen lamp makes a confident silhouette against the frosted window. Looking up at it with a straight back and an easy smile, she laughs, "I was Peter Pan for Halloween. I have the biggest crush on him."
