Family Stuff

or The Big Sale

Salt and Pepper shakers galore

Today is day one of The Big Sale at my cousin Nancy’s house. After my cousin died and her best friend in life Lorraine moved to a memory-care unit, my cousins, sisters, and I set about dealing with their house and its contents. And I mean contents galore. Nancy and Lorraine were collectors of, well, everything. Above is just the tiniest example of what covered every surface in every room.

This is a painting I did of their sweet Victorian-era house on Main Street in Freeville.

They had extensive collections of Depression-era glassware, Disney characters, baseball cards (particularly of Cal Ripken, Jr. and other notable Orioles), baseball figurines, every kind of kitchen implement you could imagine, paintings, prints, 19th-century furniture, juice glasses, covered casserole dishes, medicine bottles, blue glass, green glass, red glass, and more strands of Christmas lights than I could count.

When I walked through the house yesterday after the people running the estate sale had priced everything I was dismayed at how low the prices seemed to me. Then I figured that everything was priced to sell—which I understand. But it got me thinking about how objects gather value when we they are carrying emotional weight.

I look at the sweet little juice glasses in a glass-fronted cabinet and remember choosing my favorites to drink wine out of when visiting. Now I can own one for $5. Or the green-glass (uranium) Depression-era canister set that sat next to their stove where I would find a tea bag or sugar could now be mine for $100. That salt cellar - $10. Pink nesting bowls - $10 for the set.

I left the house feeling depressed and ill. It was all coming to an end. The decades of Thanksgiving, Easter, and Christmas family dinners. The numerous picnics on the back porch. The nights spent playing rumicube at their round table in the living room. The post-dinner gatherings with pie and coffee and glasses of wine where we solved all of our country’s problems and laughed ourselves silly. It’s where I can still picture my mother and my aunts—now all deceased—and can hear their voices. It’s where I spent a couple of hours every day talking to Nancy in the last months of her life as she sat in pain in her favorite chair.

As I helped sort through all of the things in their house, I came across piles of cards and letters that Nancy and Lorraine kept from family members and close friends, and I read each and every one. I then packed up some to send back to the correspondents if I knew them.

I came to know both Nancy and Lorraine much better when going through their possessions and it made me realize what I hadn’t really known either of them when they were still around.

Taking stock of someone’s life through the possessions they leave behind felt like a bittersweet privilege. As everyone says who finds themselves in this position, “Why didn’t I ask more questions?”