I usually don’t stop at garage sales; I’ve accumulated too much already. Nonetheless, I still find myself attracted to signs that say “estate sale” and this past weekend I impulsively pulled over to the curb and strolled into a back yard filled with boxes of stuff.
Actually, I’d be more accurate calling it boxes of junk. By late Sunday most everything had been thoroughly picked-over and what remained was just a hair’s breadth away from the dump. I wandered, wondering about the person that had collected so much. On the bottom of a chipped, handcrafted dark wooden bowl with a metal-covered flat raised center for cracking nuts it said, “Hand made in 1948 by M.D.” Who was M.D? Mike Duncan, Mitch Douglass, Monroe Dowd? I’ll never know. I tossed it back into a cardboard box filled with rusted bread and pie pans.
Inside the house, everything was tagged with a price. In one room was a collection of six massive mantle clocks, ornate faux-classical wood-carved timepieces with keyholes for winding priced from $45-$165. They all said “As Is.” It’s said even a broken clock is right twice a day, and I realized that if I collected 720 broken clocks, I could set the right time for every minute of the day. Ah, well.
One musty-smelling room was full of books, entire sets of encyclopedias and hardcover novels. I cracked open a volume that said “D” on the spine, and began to read about Delaware. The capital of Delaware is Dover, by the way. The photos were in black and white, and showed pictures of farms and cows. Not the Delaware I know.
I moved on into the garage, the space developed for the automobile but commonly transformed into a storage locker. From wall to wall, the garage was filled with tools. In one box were screwdrivers and other tools that had a similarity to screwdrivers. Chisels and awls were jumbled together with flat-heads, and Phillips – wood, plastic and metal-handled. Everything that could prod, poke or pierce had made it into this particular box.
Another carton held drills – the old-fashioned type requiring two hands and elbow grease. Some had over-sized wooden knobs at the top so a strong hand could get good purchase. There were all sizes, from modestly small to ridiculously large. In the day before electric drills, these tools were pure magic, transforming wood to curly-queues. Wait long enough and everything regains human value for a while. Tomorrow they might be “elegant knick-knack décor” hanging on the wall of a converted barn featured on HGTV.
There were boxes of pliers and all things that pinch – massive tin snips to tiny pairs of scissors – rotted cartons of screws and odd kitchen utensils; so on and so on, a massive collection, the accumulation of a life time. I thought about the magnificent obsession that drew all these tools together, and that many of them must have been acquired at other estate sales. Now, like their avid collector, all and everything was returning to the great undifferentiated source.
Of course, I too am obsessed. I bought two small stainless steel kitchen bowls and a ten-inch cast iron skillet for $5.40. When I got home I cleaned ‘em up real pretty, and used them to make lunch.
