This weekend as thousands of people descend on Hillsville for the 42nd annual flea market and gun show, I can’t help but to reminisce about trips up there with my mother to hunt for salt cellars.

What are salt cellars you ask? Thanks, I’m glad you did. They were a fancy little dish, sort of, that was placed at fancy table settings that contained salt. Some of them even had tiny little spoons with which to scoop the salt.

They were what people used before the advent of salt and pepper shakers.

My mother became fascinated with salts when she was a little girl eating at her great-aunt’s table. When Aunt Ruth died, she became the proud owner of the salts and so began the great quest more of these little treasures.

Everywhere we went, be it to the beach or to the Hillsville Flea Market, we searched and we hunted for the rare, the unusual, and truly old salts that no one seems to have anymore.

My mother used to love to show off the salts to the many visitors to our house where I grew up. She had two curio cabinets full of them, and those were the truly rare and unusual ones. She had other, less rare salts stashed away in boxes.

People would marvel at the sight of them, each more special and unique from the next. Some were shaped like animals like chickens, cows, sheep and ducks. Others were delicate and ornate. Some were made of cobalt or depression glass, but most were made of cut crystal or glass.

Now that mother has passed away, I have become the proud owner of these tiny treasures, but I don’t know what do with more than 1,000 of them. Most of them are still packed up in storage. I took out the ones I truly love and keep them around the house. I even keep one beside my stove to hold Kosher salt. Kosher salt and sea salt won’t come out of a regular salt shaker and I quit using iodized salt years ago.

As a society, for the most part, we have stopped having sit-down dinners, especially the fancy kind. So not only have these salts that my mother valued so much gone by the wayside, but not many people know what they are anymore.

Hunting for salts is something that will definitely stay with me for a lifetime. Anytime I go to a flea market or antique store I can’t help but look for a special salt for mom. But now that I own more of them than I can count, there’s no sense in purchasing more of them.

Maybe having sit-down dinners will come back into vogue. If not, that’s OK, I have a 1,000 pieces of history of shopping with my mother that no money could buy.

Mondee Tilley is a staff reporter for The Mount Airy News. She can be reached at mtilley@mtairynews.com or at 719-1930.