My mother collects china Stafforsdshire dogs. When you visit her, dozens of always-open dog eyes watch you from the mantel, the floor, high bureau tops. She began collecting after "Cricket" died, her spoiled and shivery miniature poodle. My sisters and I tried to get her a puppy but she said, "No more pets. Please." Now she has dogs to talk to in every room and, she says, "all I have to do is dust them."

One of my sisters lives in a house full of original Stickley furniture, with its severe Mission lines and uninviting cushions. The rooms ought to be cordoned off with velvet rope, like in a museum - look but don't touch. She also collects and displays Roseville pottery. My other sister collects art books. They know everything about their stuff.

My husband and I felt pressure to collect something, anything, by the rest of my family. Whenever we vacationed with them, somebody always cooked up trips to antique stores and flea markets to work on their collections. Back then we were too polite to say, "Maybe another time, thanks."

So we decided on postcards. We could deal with them: paper, light-weight, easy to sort and store, portable. And they held cryptic inked messages from strangers and quaint photographs. One day we bought two old postcards at a flea market. But I stuffed them into the back pocket of my jeans and then sat on them. No amount of ironing or flattening under piles of books could get the creases out.

So we quit collecting.

Years later, 1999 to be precise, something possessed me to order a "Twenty Five Cent Coins Collector's Album," an album for collecting 50 specially minted quarters, each honoring one of the 50 states. It came, a sturdy cardboard map of the U.S. with a quarter-size slot for each state.

This would be fun and educational for my daughters, I told myself. But they didn't buy it. Collecting quarters! They rolled their eyes at the thought: "MOM."

I stopped trying to pretend it was for them. It was for me. And I am proud to announce that nine years later I have hammered into its round holes 49 of the 50 quarters. I haven't yet found Alaska, one of the last coined in 2008.

Something I like about collecting quarters -- only five were issued a year. It's a finite task, and I don't have to traipse through stuffy antique stores to find them. They just appear in my change purse.

I don't know why people laugh when they see my colorful big map, but they do. Have you ever looked closely, with a magnifying glass, at one of these quarters? Take Maine. A bluff-perched lighthouse sends radiant lines out over the ocean. A glorious oak tree graces Connecticut's; Montana's looks like a Georgia O'Keefe painting and reads "BIG SKY COUNTRY." Good stuff.

The other day, I ran across an unnerving item about the New Jersey quarter: "Struck at the Philadelphia Mint for just 10 weeks, then never again." Philadelphia made it more valuable than Denver? Yikes. Where was mine struck? To find out, I'd have to pry it out of its cardboard hole and look for a "P" on the other side.

I guess I'm not much of a collector because I chose to do nothing. Frankly, I don't care about the provenance of my quarters or who designed them. I just like, occasionally, to gaze at those little etchings.

And when Alaska shows up in my purse, that's it. I never want to collect anything else. I'm done, almost. But until then, I can still say I'm a collector.

What about you? What do you collect? And why? Got an extra 2008 Alaska quarter?

(Contact Carol Henderson at cd.henderson@gmail.com)