“Who’s runnin’ this sale? Mary Wood?” a bearded man in a white van yelled out while my mother and I were waiting on the front lawn of a house in Glen Ridge. This house’s private internal parts were about to be exposed to the public and sold for whatever it could get (a bit sexual for describing an estate sale, I suppose).
“Yea, Mary” my mother hollered at the man and went back to dreaming about what to buy in this modest looking Colonial.
I looked around like, what, does everyone know Mary? That guy made it seem like there is such a thing as an obvious answer to who runs estate sales in Essex County.
This estate world was one in which I was not aware of, but is clearly on the radar of many others. I’d say there were 75 people amongst us, waiting until Mary would open the door and call out the numbers. Yes, numbers, because see, this event didn’t begin at 9:30 am when I was there. No, this ordeal began at 7:30 am where you would wait on a different line to pick up a number so when 9:30 came, Mary the bouncer’s job is much easier. And given that she looked like she should be at an age where she was enjoying retirement in Florida, this orderly fashion was necessary. Everyone seemed to know the deal here and had their yellow numbered slips ready.
At 11pm last night my mom sent me an email entitled, “Fabulous, Fun and Full!”. She wrote in the body, “Omg this sale looks amazing.” That night, she had zoomed in on every picture that Mary posted and pointed out to me what items she was looking to buy. One painting in particular caught her eye and she said that this was her number one:
That is my living room so, spoiler alert: we bought the painting.
Mary was ready for us. She opened the door and called out numbers 1–20. Rough, I had 21 so I stayed behind as my mom went in.
“Get the painting, ma”, I said with a stern eyebrow nod.
She walked in eager and nervous but reassured me as she went through the doorway, “I’m gonna get it”.
After a few minutes, Mary started calling more numbers and I’m in. “Thank you” I said as I handed her my yellow slip and she didn’t even acknowledge me for she was totally in the zone grabbing the next slip.
Inside was a mix of 3 different decades of styles. The living room was a bunch of mid-century style furniture including a $3,000 authentic Herman Miller chair and the painting my mother wanted with a blue garage sale sticker on it. I wondered what that meant. I moved into the other living room (because I guess you need two) and its main piece was a bold rose patterned couch set. In the dining room, tons of kitchen equipment were laid out on the countertop from teacups to percolators to clam knives.
I spotted my mom looking at some more paintings in the sun room and from her smile, I knew that that blue sticker meant it was hers.
If you start to think about what you’re doing as you’re walking through this strangers house, touching all of their possessions, you begin to think about how sad this is. Estate sales most likely happen because someone died and the family that they have left behind are liquidating whatever assets are left because none of this shit means anything to them. I was going through this lady’s bedroom, looking at the hundreds (no really) of purses she had and imagined what memories were attached to them. Did she use this one on her first date? Was this one given to her as a gift but never used? She kept all this shit because it meant something to her, right? And now here were a bunch of strangers valuing her possessions based on stains and scratches and even stranger strangers making low dollar offers to save a buck or two. She might have been livid, watching from the other world.
But truth is, wherever she was now, it didn’t matter. I started to create my own story for her and that’s the way she will be remembered in my life and there is nothing she can do about it. She must have loved baking, look at all these baking dishes. Whoa, she’s got like 12 fur coats, maybe her husband was a banker or a lawyer. I like her sense of style, I bet she was beautiful. Omg did you see that basement, it was full of so much old shit, def a horder.
I met up with my mom at the front entrance and with her she had, an american flag, a stainless steel soap dish, a water pitcher, and four paintings. At that point, Mary became someone I knew. “Oh ma, Mary is over here, lets go pay.”
