It’s Just Stuff: What Estate Sales Reveal About Us

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.

I’m starting to get the general rhythm of these sales at thresholds. The number of blood pressure machines, wheelchairs, and bedside commodes tell a story. Whether due to a downsizing, divorce, or death, an estate sale is a sort of liminal space – a passing of the tools and accumulated flotsam of a life onto descendants who cannot always bear the added weight and so jettison it. At one sale a lemon tree is dropping a ransom in bright, heavy fruit left to rot on the lawn furniture. In the kitchen a bowl sits full of apples and in the center: a perfectly ripe avocado. They haven’t been gone long.

Here’s the pattern. In a multiday sale the collectors and resellers line up outside at dawn. They buy efficiently and bring a truck to move heavy furniture. If you show up on the second day, you’ll never meet them. Second day visitors are locals, neighbors, and folks looking for a good deal. The pace is slower, the mood lighter, and the prices lower. Sometimes I go on the second day, but lately this has become my practice: I go at the end, when the big top is being dismantled and the makeup wiped off.

By the last two hours the frenzy is over. The lady at the plastic folding table by the entrance who gets up to bag the excess linens says in what she thinks is a reassuring tone, “Don’t worry, it’s all going to TJ. It won’t end up in a landfill somewhere.” Another worker wields a red marker, scribbling $5 over the $170 tag on the barstools.

There will always be stuff at the end that no one wants or is simply too heavy to easily move. The vulgar economic reality is that a nearly mint-condition wooden record player, listed for hundreds two days before, will go free to the person who can lift it and move it out of the house at the end.

At the end the mood is somber in the leftover debris, the rolling confession of a life. I rescue ordinary things, bring home pots for the garden, chasing out the spiders and hosing them down before planting something new and giving them a second life. I think of their owners and of my ancestors. I buy stationary because we all have more pages than minutes to write what we mean and to whom. Sometimes in the first two pages of a notebook, there’s a note or a to-do list: “Take out the garbage, visit granny with her laundry (in the dryer).” I pray they got to finish their work.

Photograph by Steve / Adobe Stock.

At the next estate sale, a large oil painting of a grinning toddler eyes me from the dresser in the main bedroom while I look over a roll of wrapping paper. The ponytailed man at the register says the painting is of him. He’s lived with his grandparents since he was two, and now he’s selling the house. A hush falls on the people in the room idly considering whether they could use another vase. Gone suddenly are the boxes of taper candles and mismatched mugs. We are instead at a wake, but instead of a body to view, here is a descendant, bewildered by the recent loss of the only parents he’s ever known, and the attendants are strangers rifling through his childhood, not knowing enough to mourn with him.

He looks away, and after a pause I quietly suggest, “Keep the painting.”

The woman beside me nods emphatically. After a pause his tight face opens, and just as quietly he replies, “Maybe I will.” Later he smiles, an older, ganglier version of my son, showing him carvings he whittled with his grandfather.

I remind myself: It’s just stuff. In my second year of medical school my prized kitchen accessory is a matching set of colorful wooden bowls. My friend Brandy borrows them and puts them through the dishwasher. She’s upset with me for being upset. “It’s just stuff,” she says, because yes, there are people, and there are things, and I should keep the difference before the eyes of my heart.

We all have too many vases and not enough flowers. The same painting of the cottage in the green meadow hangs over our collective heads. We have approximately the same grand gardening aspirations, which leave us with more urns than sense. We buy cream jugs for our better Sunday selves to serve proper tea. We travel to different places and bring back the same souvenirs. We have more lockets than beloved faces to put inside, more wooden trains than track, more clocks than time. We hold onto the inevitable “good” china. We have too many dinner plates and not enough guests.

Still, in the thick of an estate sale, it bothers me most to see people’s things on the floor. My mother wept to see my great aunt Malaka’s pillows on the ground when we cleaned out her apartment. She always lined them up carefully along the headboard every living day. My father waits until she relays all the details. “But Salwa,” he says patiently, “we’re going to put her entire body in the ground.”

In the fifteenth year of our marriage we buy our first home. Before we’re handed the keys, myriad strangers walk through our house in a two-day estate sale. “Let’s go,” my husband says, but I hesitate. It feels wrong. It takes me some time, but we stop by at the end. So many strangers have now walked our home before it was ours, before we cleaned the ground and made it home so our children could walk in their bare feet in its sanctuary. It turns out that it’s a good way to start, seeing the accumulation of a lifetime cleared out of our house before we move in. I imagine it happening again in thirty or forty years if we’re given time.

They remove everything, almost. A week after we move in, I’m cleaning the bathroom, and beneath a paper drawer liner find six plastic combs and the white hair through which they passed. In another drawer a sticky note on which, in a hand that shook, is written, “Harissa Chile Paste.” I learn of them bit by bit through the things that survive them: the oak cabinets, the carefully tended roses, the wallpaper. What will be left when we leave this place?

In our second year in the house wildfires burn thirty miles away, with near-constant evacuation threats and high winds. We evacuated before, on the east coast, out of the paths of several hurricanes, but this is different. Places people thought were immune to calamity – where money often buffers suffering – now burn to ash.

The sky fills with smoke, the sunsets are painted in saturated orange, bold pinks, and fire-red. I deliberate for two days to the gnawing realization that many have only two minutes to evacuate, then pack a “go-bag.”

With a surgical eye I look over the accumulation of two adult lifetimes and the things toddlers find irreplaceable. For me, it isn’t much. My grandmother’s jewelry, the two or three dresses that fit extra right, a couple of vintage perfumes I can’t replace. Photos. It was difficult but quicker than I thought it would be. Difficult, because I love the things I keep in my home, the comfort and familiarity of them. Quick, ultimately, because there are people and there are things.

When we clean out my grandmother’s house, my uncle sniffs and cringes, opens the windows, and disembowels her fridge down to the last sauce packet of all she had scrimped, saved, and pickled. All her carefully packed suitcases – where did she want to go? – spill their cargo across bedspreads and dressers and finally, the ground.

While her pressed linens carpet the floor, precious unopened boxes of chocolates are dumped whole. Unburned candles, unspritzed perfume, unswiped lipstick – they’re all thrown away by children who can’t bear the sight of her things out of their rightful context. Finally, they open wide the doors and bid the neighbors enter and take their pick. A few months before her death, my grandmother presses a small, flat box of gold-plated spoons into my toddler’s hands. I protest instinctively, but she is determined. He uses them now, a small, shiny happiness against his oatmeal.

I take my sons to estate sales so they can bring home small, hand-carved wooden animals for their bookshelves, old glass marbles in jars, and yet more rocks. Mostly I bring them so they can see that the insides of other people’s homes are like their own, and so the baby can babble happily at strangers in these holy places, and the tired workers at the front can let the toddler keep the lemon that fell from the backyard tree that he’s clutching excitedly.

My older son optimistically buys oil paints only to realize as we examine them at home, the trash can slowly filling between us, that the colors of the rainbow have dried up until the only usable ones are burnt umber, black, and white. In one house, listed for five million dollars after the fifty-year-old owner had an unexpected stroke, a worker tells my son to feel how soft the bedsheets are before stuffing them into a black trash bag to be donated. Sometimes people – and even things – simply run out of time.

Today, steam from my coffee rises to early morning birdsong while I prop the baby on my hip, nudge open the screen door, and pick my way over the dew-wet stepping stones, past the white roses, under the arch beneath the cypress trees, and over the threshold into my parents’ backyard. The cypress saplings were my height when my father planted them in the late eighties, and now they block the second-floor view between our homes. Some say it’s too close, too suffocating, to live next door, but friends who have lost parents get really quiet when they find out.

Now the boys run over to help my father pick the last of the dark plums we sprinkled with cayenne pepper to save from the squirrels. He’s made the soil between our homes fertile. Soon it will be the season of avocados and figs, then guava. The jade bird on my desk readies for flight and outside my window the robins are singing.

I look around my home and my parents’ and hear the hush of hour zero of an estate sale, before the first shoppers are let loose. I want to say to my elders, the ones I love, the ones who hoard, though sometimes the message is garbled: For God’s sake, don’t leave it unused. Don’t leave it unpainted, unread, uneaten. Don’t leave a single crumb.

For our new home I find a handwoven Turkish rug and a teal recliner at a sale in the home of the ninety-nine-year-old woman who lived a few blocks away. I receive with gratitude and astonishment anything of value any absent owners leave. The olivewood hand cross worn smooth by hands more devoted than mine. The onyx studs, the blue delft mug for my evening tea, and the book of synonyms beside me. I silently thank another ninety-nine-year-old woman who moved into a retirement home and left behind her perfectly sized dresses and suit skirts, and my new, soft, white winter coat. Hers, then mine, for a time.

I declutter mountains of things out of our lives. It feels lighter, but in our last move, the sheer number of things astounds me. It has taught me this, though: the weighing of an object between my palms, the pause before the purchase, the hesitation long enough to make certain that the thing can have a life with us; then the holding of it all with the open palm and the letting it go.

One day as I unload the dishwasher I notice, in the dark red mug with the pleasing curve warm within my palm, the one that held so many early morning brews, a fatal hairline fissure. My mother, who has lost a beloved aunt, mother, brother, and father in the last three years peers over my shoulder and shrugs. “Omra-ha,” she says in Arabic. Loosely, “Its lifetime.” It has lived its life.

When I say goodnight and duck back beneath the cypress trees with the baby, my breath catches at the temporary grace of it, the overabundance in this cup of mine that’s spilling over, for now.