Saturday I went to my first estate sale because I wanted the cement benches that were pictured on the estate sale website. I want cement benches, but I want them cheap. My husband said if I decided to buy the benches after I got there, to call him and he would come with the van. This is his passive aggressive way of not participating without flat out telling me he doesn't want to go and doesn't want the benches.
It was very likely that when I called, he wouldn't answer the phone under the guise of being asleep. He can conveniently go into a deep, coma-like sleep when he doesn't want to do something.
But first he tried a Jedi mind trick on me. Why buy someone else's used, dirty cement benches? By the time I spent 10 hours cleaning them up, I could have easily bought new ones.
Wait a minute. First, I would never spend 10 hours cleaning anything up. After 30 minutes, anything I'm cleaning is as clean as it's ever going to get. And if I did spend 10 hours cleaning my dirty, used benches, how is that losing money I could have used to buy new ones? Am I taking time away from doing something else that would have paid me money? Was someone going to pay me to clean their benches, but instead I used that time to clean my own? I don't get the math here.
My husband is clearly not an economist.
So, a little bitterly, I set off for the estate sale, was shocked at how many cars were already there, and by the time I found the benches, a woman was taking the tags off them and declaring them hers. I could have had two benches for $50 if I had spent less time arguing with my husband over his bizarro theory of economics.
So it wouldn't be a total loss, I wandered around the place looking at the remaining stuff, and I do mean stuff. What happened to these people that suddenly everything they own has a price tag on it, including the house? Their property was called a "farmette." It had six outbuildings, all in various states of decay. Two of the buildings once served as kennels for multiple dogs. There was an old speed boat in the yard. An equally old tanning bed was in one shed. One shed was full of neon signs advertising beer and barbecue. From these meager clues, I tried to imagine who these people were. And what happened to them?
The house itself didn't seem particularly large and had long ago ceased being modernized for paint and carpeting. The narrow dining room had a humongous and ornate dining room set in it that would look overpowering in a castle dining hall. The 10 huge chairs were fit for royalty. There was a triple china cabinet and not one but two matching sideboards. It was not possible to sit in four of the chairs and if the table was pulled out to the center of the room, it would not have been possible to sit in eight of them. What crazy day was it when the owners brought this dining room set into this house?
But what struck me the most was the number of glasses, glass vases, glass bowls, china sets, knick knacks and figurines in the house. Shelves and tabletops in every room were loaded with them. There were boxes of them out in the sheds. The going price was $1 or 50 cents a piece, and not many were being purchased, because, frankly, who needs more than six glasses, one vase, and one set of dishes ever? And you never need figurines. Nothing good comes of all this junk except eventually having them all in a dusty box at your estate sale, marked down to 25 cents a piece and still not selling.
How much money do we spend on this stuff? I suppose if we all took a vow to never buy another glass or vase or figurine again, it would destroy the knick knack economy and jobs would be lost, but truly, what is the point of household debris?
I try to limit the amount of junk I accumulate. Moving to smaller places has forced purges, but when you get settled in one place too long, even if you never buy this stuff, you get it as gifts. Like these two statuettes I have of life-sized kittens sitting on their hind legs, wearing glued on Santa Claus hats. Someone gave me those. And one day, it sits at an estate sale, languishing. Whatever meaning it had for you is long forgotten. In the year 2040, someone will be at my estate sale, looking at those cats in hats and thinking, what the heck?
