Nothing like a good story. Some I read. Some I watch. Some I find at estate sales.
The mechanic who no longer needed the tools collected over the years. The crafter who once upon a time gushed over decorative odds and ends now left for others to discover. The shopaholic’s unworn hoard of clothes that could have stocked a boutique shop.
Describing that last sale to a friend I said, “It’s the only time I have seen two dozen swimsuits with store tags still attached. That woman liked to shop more than she liked to cook. Some estate sales have two, three, even four sets of pots and pans. She had an old inexpensive set that barely filled a corner of the kitchen counter. Yet, socks and shoes overflowed several tables along with boxes of blouses and pants. If she found a style she liked, she bought one in every color offered. Her penchant for shopping extended to makeup as the heap of unopened packages testified.”
Besides being a Nosy Parker, I go to estate sales looking for Bibles and Christian literature to send to Love Packages or new and gently used items for various non-profits. From that house heaped with clothes, I filled a box with new socks for Liberty Baptist’s outreach program or to stuff in Operation Christmas Child boxes.
Walking through the house, I found her child’s yearbooks in one room, the cross stitch piece she stitched for him in another and then, in a neglected corner I dug through a box of unsold clothes that included a t-shirt printed to commemorate her late son’s too short life.
I left wondering if she shopped to numb her pain.
The signs for the other estate sale took me to a low roofed, log cabin at the end of a tree lined road. It was a picker’s sale in a house that the nearby family used to store items they did not need but wanted to keep.
I learned that a former Mississippi University math professor had built the log cabin. He lived there alone, like a hermit. Although he died 18 years ago, many of his treasures remained when his cabin became a storage unit.
At a picker’s sale, the sale manager does not spend long days cleaning and sorting. Instead, customers pick through the detritus for hidden treasures. I came late to the sale, but still found books, decorations, dishes and vintage furniture: an antique pump organ with a shredded music holder, a Hoosier cabinet (just like Grandma had) in great condition and a cast iron bed frame.
Eventually I found stacks of advanced math books inside a chiffarobe. A picker working beside me saw the calculus texts and said, “someone knew a lot about math.”
The homeowner had once taught the logic of math, but his imagination in the supernatural lined the shelves around the ceiling of the another room along with science fiction and primitive fantasies. He had all but one of the Tarzan books of his youth. I learned that he loved talking about the strange stories found in his library of paperbacks about UFOs, extraterrestrials and the Bermuda Triangle.
I found his name written in his set of The History of Technology: Terence W. Daniel. His neighbors said Daniel had helped two others solve a math problem which put his name in a publication of the solution. They heard how badly he felt when he realized his students earned more than he did. Years later, when he went to the heart hospital, he eagerly reported that a doctor greeted him by name and fondly recalled being his student.
He may have lived out his last decades deep in the woods at the end of the road, but his memory and story lives in the life of each student he taught; not in the books and knick knacks sold at the picker’s estate sale.