Estate Sale

This morning found me snooping through the closets, cabinets, and bedrooms of a person who is no longer here. I was fingering trinkets and rifling through possessions that someone else called their own. I was at an estate sale. I do fine at garage sales, yard sales, and community sales. I eagerly dash from pile to pile hoping to score the perfect must-have item at a steal of a deal. But these estate sales always carry with them a heavy presence of the now-deceased owner. It's one thing to decide to sell your things; it's another to have them laid out on cardboard tables and in cardboard boxes for all the world to pick through.

It made me think about all of the things I call my own. I am thinking that I would much rather whittle down the number of my possessions now...while it's still up to ME. In the end isn't it always "the little things" that carry more sentiment rather than the "big" items or the "most expensive" pieces? To anyone else (even my closest family members) my collection of journals and notebooks may be viewed as things that could all be compiled into one giant box for .10c a piece or "take the whole box for $1.00." Oh the thought of such a travesty. For goodness sakes sell the leather couch...sell the big t.v...sell the computer, and the printer, and the dvd player...shoot...give 'em all away...but don't let a stranger lay their hands on the things that are me.

Maybe I should hold a family meeting and explain that the tiny what-not of the black and white cow reminds me of my grandmother's house. Maybe I need to emphasize the emotional tie that I have to the tiny bottle of Tinkerbell's pixie dust my mom gave me when I graduated from college. And that cedar hope chest...the one that in all likely hood could fetch a nice sum of cash...please hold on to it...it belonged to my grandmother and I can still smell it's old smell in the place where I store all of my memories of all things good...I can still remember opening it at my grandma's house and digging through it's delightful treasures: books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie; an old baby doll my mother used to play with; that tiny torquoise lock and key... It is now in my bedroom and I really want it to be in my daughter's home and then passed on from there. Maybe I should go through the house and put all of the things that truly speak to me inside that hope chest...where it is my hope that they never really leave.