Apron museum in northern Mississippi recounts more than cooking life

Carolyn Terry cheerfully tells people to look for her apron museum between the two highest steeples in this slow drawl of a town.

Or simply ask. Someone will point you to the new business on Eastport Street, the one with an apron painted on its window and birdhouses and other art spilling out its doors, a colorful cornucopia of local talent.
Why aprons? Why does the enthusiastic, almost evangelistic, Carolyn Terry collect, display and, sometimes, sell them?

(She doesn't so much sell aprons as adopt them out, making sure the prospective owner knows the history and significance of the piece.)

Her expressive eyes light up at that question, and this ambassadress of aprons gives a lovely, impromptu speech: Aprons touch everybody, Carolyn says. There's not anything else as 'common' that's also art. If I collected paintbrushes, that would mean something to a few. But aprons mean something to us all.

And it's not...