ROXBORO — Chances are, you have a set sitting on your dinner table right now. They were probably there at lunch and breakfast too. They're an everyday part of life, and yet we tend to take them for granted. But not Alice Whitfield. At her house in Roxboro, there's a whole lotta shakin' goin' on.

"When they walk in my house, they're just shocked," she says.

When it rains, it pours. Salt and pepper shakers, thousands of them. They belong to the woman with the salt and pepper hair.

There's the piano and the stool, the comb and brush, Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence," she says, and that does not begin to scratch the surface.

"I think a lot of them are clever because I would not have thought about making salt and pepper shakers out of a lot of these," Whitfield says.

Alice started collecting 27 years ago. She would pick up pairs at flea markets and yard sales.

"I just found some of hte most amazing ones, I mean, they were just so different," Whitfield says. "Like I've got John F. Kennedy in a rocking chair. That one's real neat."

She holds up another set. "Now this one is a couple getting married. Then you turn it around. They done got to be fat and old and ugly, I guess," she laughs.

"It's a joke in this house about all these shakers in this house and we can't even find a shaker when we get ready to eat."

Salt and pepper, they go together. Just like Alice and her collection.

"I mean one just wouldn't be the same without the other," she says. "They're attention-getters, that's for sure."