Estate Sales

 

I love Estate Sales. I rarely buy anything—our house is full—but they give me a chance to step into someone else’s home, house, and material life. How do you arrange your cabinets? What do you value? When was the last time you painted your walls and what color? How are the rooms laid out inside that house—what does that layout say about the era, its values and esthetics? What can I learn about daily life from this house? I call it intellectual curiosity. Mark says I am just nosy.

There was an estate sale in the neighborhood on Friday. I was on my way to water the trees at the school garden, but I stopped in. The house fronted our local neighborhood park and was built in the 1920s. There was some remodeling—more like redecorating—done in the early 1970s, when they also added a garden shed. The place was packed. People were everywhere—and the interior of the house had exploded into the back yard, but that did not empty it out. The basement held an entire series of metal shelves, all full of stuff. I wandered around, stunned. It was chaos. There were big boxes and bins full of hot wheels and matchbox cars, still in their packages. There were at least three hundred cookbooks. There were shelves of board games—versions on Monopoly that I did not know existed. Upstairs, one room was fill of plastic model horses and other animals. A closet held three sewing machines and paper patterns.  The kitchen held shelves of stemware—fifty heavy wineglasses, the kind that you might use in a restaurant with a clumsy dishwasher. Boxes of canning jars. Wind chimes. Tools. Bins full of dishes—full sets of Good China from the 1950s. Clear cut glass. It was hard to know. Some stuff was still wrapped up. People were digging through the piles, finding treasures.  None of it was truly antique, or expensive, or valuable at any point in its life. It was all the stuff of working people’s lives that, when cared for, made a home.

In the lowest corner of the garden shed, I spotted some pink glass. I squatted down to look more closely. Under a ceramic coffee pot, a knife wrapped in cardboard, a set of binoculars, and some paper, I found four pink glass coffee mugs still priced and wrapped from a past yard sale. There were four larger pink glass plates from the same time. They went with some teacups and plates I already had at home—and with my Aunt Jean’s Good China in my cabinet—so I carefully hauled them out and replaced the other stuff into the milk crate. I paid eight dollars for it all—which is the same price that last owner paid, who knows when, before it was buried in a milk crate in the garden shed—took it home, and washed it off. We used it for breakfast on Saturday morning.

In contrast, Mark and I went to our friend Maureen’s small house concert yesterday afternoon. We sat on her covered patio, surrounded by things there were not, in value, any different from what had been at the estate sale on Friday. But they were all loved, cared for, clean, and arranged. Maureen has said, over the years, how much she enjoys keeping her house. When she cleans, she remembers where she found her objects or the people who gave them to her so that she feels surrounded by her life and love in her home. I feel the same way; I love having an orderly house, surrounded by objects that I love, although my home and garden will never be as tidy as Maureen’s. Our stuff is the story of our lives.

If that is true, then something went wrong in this house on the park. The people who lived here loved objects, clearly, as well. At one point, they had a good eye for inexpensive treasures.  But something happened and it went from a cared for home to something else that did not feel healthy, sane, or safe. What happened? How? Could we, as a community, have done something to help out before it ended in this chaotic Estate Sale where rumors suggested that she “had” to clear out and sell the house to live somewhere else?  How many other elders are tucked away in small houses, surrounded by not only the beloved objects of their lives, but stuff that has just….accumulated because it might be useful someday?  What is the story of their lives?