At an estate sale in Lakewood, I pay fifty cents for a jade bird in flight and discover later it is worth a thousand times that. At the next estate sale, my son finds 1970s vintage LEGOs and a gardening trowel. I find the selected poems of Carl Sandburg and a burgundy cut-glass bud vase. In another house, listed for four million dollars, I discreetly water a thirsty orchid in the kitchen. They always look dead but aren’t. There’s a yacht framed in the picture window in the dining room, but upstairs a hospital bed smelling of urine is still reclined. People exclaim at the yacht but hush entering the bedroom.

An estate sale is a sort of liminal space – a passing on of the accumulated flotsam of a life.