What You Take With You

We arrive early and are milling around someone’s life holdings, viewing the offerings collected since the 1930’s, that three generations held from the old country till now, to be sold at auction. It’ll all be over in a few hours. Reduced to cash as prized collections and sets are broken up, sold to different people, driving away in trucks, vans and Volvos. The family photo albums, scrap books and sometimes journals and handed down recipe collections usually left behind with the old Reader’s Digest books.

When it’s time to start, we sit in lawn chairs a little over heated under a tent on a perfect Vermont summer day, bees landing on the sausage and pepper sandwich that is irresistible after smelling it waft from the food truck for an hour. We are in an altered state here, frozen in suspension as the auctioneer’s hypnotic patter keeps us reeled in, the auction field pulling us all en masse to want and need things we’d otherwise never bother with at a yard sale. We are fascinated by the bidding styles everyone has: always start at half of whatever the auctioneer throws out and go from there. Offer a dollar when no hands are up to make friends with the Auctioneer. Poker faces and animated bidding wars, applause at the really big sales, everyone attentive even for the weird little collectable spoons they don’t care about but are keen to see what they sell for. For what it is worth, today. It could be worth a lot less at your shop tomorrow or way more than you paid.  

It starts an hour earlier, while wandering the house, an 1800’s stone beauty with stone floors and remarkably high ceilings. The rooms a circular flow, so around we go, examining fine and mismatched china, exquisite gold, silver, gems and costume jewelry, old and newer books, the collection of Indian prints and tchotchkes, straight worn old oak furniture, new pressed board storage warped by gravity, dark crawl spaces under eaves where it all goes till somebody needs it someday but no one ever does. Broken frames, old newspapers, sometimes history has a value and sometimes not. The first floor is laid out staging the best. The second floor will be sold as is on a walk through at the end of the auction. The beds, bathroom cabinets, the mundane dressers and closets of clothes, along with the tools, battery chargers, lawn mowers, snow blowers and hoses in the garage, the old paint and workshop jars of nuts and bolts, specialty tools and old rusty saws in the damp basement. The pickers get in each other’s way looking for hidden deals in the minutiae of the mundane. Barely making a living at this, they power through the dusty, detritus, trading glory stories of the few times they made a real killing, like the time they found fifty dollar bills between the pages of all the black books in a room after the picker who bought it was done with it and offered the dusty remains to them for free.

It’s all in the timing, variation of what is up next, a fifteen dollar floor lamp, a forty dollar yellow ware bowl, a twenty dollar train set, a bidding war for a twelve hundred dollar Chippendale chair, a thirty-five dollar set of chipped flow blue plates, a ninety dollar cardboard box of mildewed vintage linens, the three hundred-forty dollar lot of handcrafted silver and turquoise jewelry from the 40’s, the ten dollar microwave, the one hundred-fifteen dollar Georgia Balch painting I bought, the twenty dollar box of cranberry glass, the two hundred fifty dollar leather jingle bell horse harness, the five dollar giant box of Christmas decorations and the forty dollar box of a dozen vintage glass ornaments. And on it goes like this for three or four hours.

You wait all day for that one thing you secretly really want but would never tell, hoping everyone else will be asleep when the time comes or that no one would care or want that prized thing, that slender little mirror with the Indian on horseback meeting the sun or the four matching chairs that are not antiques but would work for Mom’s kitchen and the few commodes that fit anywhere including your little car on the way home. You end up with maybe one thing you had intended to win and a car full of random things that were too good to pass up. All of which will require you to honor that deal that you made with yourself about acquiring more stuff. Anything you buy from now on has to replace something you sell or give away. It has to be something you like better than what you have or will trade something for because you have downsized your life and are no longer acquiring. Sometimes, you know you can sell it, so that’s ok too. 

It was a time out of normal time. If you go often enough, you get to know all the dealers, collectors, pickers, and Ebay sellers in your area. A little community exists there. You learn over and over that when you die, your family and friends will have to wonder about the worth of your life’s collections, will have to decide, what is sentimental and what is just clutter and junk, will have to sort through the detritus that you couldn’t sort through and bravely part with yourself, will have to figure out how to move it out. They’ll have to fight the guilt of getting rid of what isn’t meaningful to them but that you kept as yours all these years. They may have coveted a few favorite things and know just where it will go and for all the maybe’s and shoulds they keep, will have to figure out where to put and how to integrate it in their already full lives.  Their home to will become and alter of things that will remind them of you or their grandmother, grandfather or great grandmother. After many surrenders and yard sales, they too will whittle it down to those most essential things because they have a preference for their own lives and their own things, as it should be because to them, you were never really what you had. You were how well you loved them or failed to.

5/24/09,  revised 2/28/16