Estate Sale

Books and books and more books. Mostly paperbacks. Some quite good texts, but mostly popular, pulp editions, faded, yellowed, moldy. Dishes, dishes, dishes. How many different, partial sets all a clattering? How many cups and mugs does a person need? Bric-a-brac out the wazoo. Vintage Christmas stuff. Twenty plus St. Nicholases, Father Christmases, Santa Clauses. Old vinyl records. Old, but newer CDs. An old woman’s clothes. A 1950s era case of August Schell beer bottles (New Ulm, Minnesota). Why would you hold onto a case of empties for 70 years, beginning almost 50 years before Ebay was even invented—and can now fetch a handsome $50 thereon. All that crap remained, even after it was overheard that half a dozen of her children had already laid their claims.

And in the garage, the walkers, the wheelchair, the plastic mattress, which triggered my sympathy. For an estate sale to happen, someone has to die. An old lady, and here her stuff. My old lady would never permit such accumulation, such a seemingly redundant, indiscriminate congeries of global detritus. She’s rather an avenging angel of minimalism—though she carried off some salad tongs and a pillow. The crap that posthumously becomes someone else’s crap is evidence, I suppose, of having lived and read—and shopped. But it is a melancholy legacy at best. In the basement among the clutter of dingier relics I encountered this timeless wisdom:

 

So true. There’s no room in the afterlife for all that stuff.