For sale

Have you ever been to an estate sale? Not a fancy-schmancy Sotheby’s type of estate sale, but an estate sale at a regular, middle-class house filled with well-worn furniture and everyday dishes and decorative items both lovely and hideous and all of the evidence and remnants of a particular life lived in a particular place. 

Well, the first thing to know about that kind of estate sale is that everything is for sale. The furniture and the artwork and collectibles and the dishes and silver, of course; but also the towels and the stained plastic containers and the half-used spray bottles of cleaning fluid and even still-wrapped rolls of toilet paper. Everything is for sale. 

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Not long ago, I went to just such an estate sale. I hadn’t been to one in a long time, but it was in my neighborhood and I didn’t have much else to do that Saturday morning, and you never know--you might find something amazing. Or you might not. But there’s only one way to find out. 

We passed the house earlyish in the morning; around 9, just when the sale opened, and thanks to the damn ‘rona, there was a line maybe 30 people long waiting to get in. So we decided to come back later. By 1 PM, the line was gone, and we were able to walk right in. 

My guess, from the furnishings and carpet, was that the owners were people in their late 70s or early 80s who had last redecorated in the late 1980s. The living room furniture was upholstered in the pale peach and dark green color combination that was particular to that time and no other. Although the sale had obviously been very well attended, the house was still full of items for sale--furniture, books and the bookshelves that housed them, framed art, collectibles, area rugs. 

Unless you’re shopping for furniture, though (and I wasn’t), then that’s not the interesting part of an estate sale. The interesting part is in the kitchen and the family room and the bedrooms and even the bathrooms. This is where the “everything is for sale” rule is proven, and this is where you get to see how other people lived, and maybe understand a little bit about who they were. 

We didn’t know who the homeowners were, of course. As I mentioned, I guessed that they were a couple in their late 70s or early 80s. But I didn’t know the circumstances surrounding the estate sale. Had the home’s residents died? Was there maybe just one surviving member of the couple who now required care and was moving into assisted living? Or maybe they were a hale and hearty pair of retirees who were just moving to Florida and selling all of their stuff so they didn’t have to carry it with them.

Most of the downstairs, except the kitchen, was covered with thick, surprisingly clean carpet. People had tracked in some dirt and bits and shreds of dead leaves, and I could imagine the person who once lived there just itching for everyone to leave so that she could get out the vacuum cleaner and restore her home to its customary cleanliness and order. The wooden staircase was not carpeted, and I felt like an intruder as I clomp-clomp-clomped up the stairs in my hard-soled shoes to the private part of the house, the part where even people who knew the residents well enough to visit their home might not have set foot. 

The second floor had four bedrooms arranged around a small carpeted hallway, with the bathroom right in the middle at the top of the stairs. One of the bedrooms was filled with craft supplies, gift wrap, and Christmas decorations. I don’t craft, and I have plenty of wrapping paper, but I like to get one or two new Christmas ornaments every year; and I was delighted to find a tiny Peanuts Christmas snow globe still in its original packaging, for the very reasonable price of four dollars. Sold. Finding nothing else of interest in that room, I went into the master bedroom, which still had a bed and a dresser and nightstands (for sale, of course) and racks of clothing, including a few vintage designer pieces. I suppose I could have bought the Halston dress and the Oscar de la Renta jacket and then resold them on Ebay, but I didn’t feel like it. Maybe someone who genuinely loves 1970s fashion bought the pieces and will wear them and care for them. Or maybe some more enterprising person bought them to resell on Ebay. 

In the last of the four bedrooms, there was a dresser and a single bed, and then boxes of vinyl records and piles of board games. The vinyl records were mostly classical and jazz recordings, and I don’t know enough about either type of music to know if they were good recordings or not. And if a board game isn’t Scrabble, it’s dead to me.

When I say that everything is for sale, I mean everything, and that includes the contents of the bathroom. And when I say the contents of the bathroom, I mean everything except the tile and the attached fixtures, including toilet paper rolls, wrapped bars of soap and half-empty bottles of shampoo, toothbrushes in their unopened blister packets, towels, bath rugs, and a vintage hair dryer and set of hot rollers. I hadn’t seen hot rollers in years. My mother used to use hot rollers. I always loved the way they could make a whole room smell like warm, freshly washed hair. I can’t imagine taking 30 minutes or more every day to patiently roll and pin sections of my hair and then wait for the whole thing to set, but more power to anyone who does. Do what you want. It’s your hair. 

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So that was it. A nostalgic house tour and a Peanuts snow globe, for the low, low price of $4. Not a bad day’s work. I wasn’t sure why, but I liked the people who lived in that house, whoever they were. I felt sorry that perhaps they had died, but I didn’t feel sad about death in general, or about my own eventual demise. In fact, I told my sons later that when I die, they should promptly contact an estate sale broker to liquidate the contents of our house. And I imagined the day (decades from now, one hopes) when strangers would troop through my house, looking at our books and pictures and art and Washington Capitals memorabilia, and picking up a treasure for a few dollars. Maybe they’ll imagine who we were. And maybe they’ll like us. But if they’re looking for hairstyling equipment, they’re out of luck..