On the weekends I enjoy going to estate sales within an easy drive from my place. I can usually count on four or five every weekend, and I’ll start out in the morning and finish covering my sales by noon or early afternoon. It’s been my way of learning the new state I reside in, getting around to see the countryside, meeting folks and as a way of just getting out of the house. I’ll go to the ATM first, grab some cash, and then enter the addresses of the sales into the GPS and away I go! All of these estate sales also take credit cards in the event that you stumble upon something expensive that ends up as a “must have”, which hardly ever happens, so with a credit card, you’re covered and ready for anything!
You enter an estate sale through the front door usually, and the entire house is open to inspection with prices stickered on all items, or signs posted on the wall of each room listing prices. Upon entering the home, most people head to the right by habit, which usually is the main living area but I head for the kitchen, which isn’t very populated, except by “Foodies” like me. I love cooking, and I learned that from my dad, who was a professionally trained chef, and taught me early in life the difference between eating for fuel and truly enjoying the preparation of food lovingly and deliciously for the dining table, as a wonderful ritual, to be repeated endlessly throughout a lifetime, mostly during moments of intimacy, happiness and warm camaraderie.
Saturday I walked into the second sale of the day, a sparsely furnished little condo nestled among a neatly kept, sleepy gated community in New Port Richey, and found my way into the little kitchen and was drawn to an open shoebox sitting on the tiled, 1950’s vintage kitchen counter. I was at once, a kid again, living at 149 Park Drive in Clawson, Michigan, and it was Christmas of 1953, with nearly a foot of snow on the ground and the first Christmas in our new home. Inside the shoebox were a variety of old tin cookie cutters, a gingerbread man, a clown, a cross, a diamond shaped cutter and others less animated or familiar. But I remembered the gingerbread man and the clown for I had seen them, held them, and savored their goodness as sugar or molasses cookies many times when mom would bake them for us around the holidays and of course, that sweet memory triggered so many others that I remember and cherish from my time as a child growing up, before there were any cares about the future and life’s’ many dramas and sorrows and responsibilities and inevitable losses as the years moved forward. Standing in that little condo kitchen, suddenly, at 71 years old, I was in love with these old tin cookie cutters… “Pillsbury’s Comicooky Cutters” that had probably seen more Christmas holidays than I, and I had to own them and bring them home today. The hand written sticker on the box indicated “25 each”… my God, I thought, much as I love antiques, much as I’d love to own these little mementoes from my past, I can’t pay $25 for something I will probably never even use, so I moved on to another room in the house.
Finally out in the garage, I came upon a box full of old photos, all beautifully framed, some for hanging on a wall, some for standing on a shelf, but all still framing special moments in a lifetime, weddings, graduations and vacations, and family gatherings of all occasions, all smiling faces filled with happiness and hope and dreams of even better days ahead. The newborns, the babies, the youth of the family, the elders, the in-between mid-life couples in the throes of raising their kids and forging careers and trying to grasp even the slightest hold of the elusive American Dream. And I wondered, how could it be that no one wanted these maps of a lifetime? Why would any family allow these to slip from their possession… how could all of this history captured in perhaps one-of-a-kind photographs, end up here in the garage in an estate sale, priced at “Small frames – 1 each”? Surely, even if the occupants of this condo were no longer living, there were others in their family who would cherish these wonderful photographs, weren’t there? Yet here they were, and for a dollar each, I could take the framed photos out, toss the photographs away forever, and the empty frame was my prize. As beautiful as some of those frames really were, I chose not to buy any of them. There was something about doing this that was spiritually wrong and troubling, very like walking on someone’s grave, but then, estate sales are by definition, bittersweet, and mark a kind of unremarkable, yet appalling end of being.
As I made my way out of the garage, I had to pass through the kitchen once more, saw the shoebox on the counter and the three cookie cutters that I really liked most were still there, so I grabbed them, took them up to the man running the sale, standing just inside the front door, behind a card table with a small cash register sitting in front of him, and holding up the three tin cookie cutters, asked, “How much?”, even though I already knew I wasn’t going to pay anything like twenty-five dollars each for these.
“Twenty-five cents each…”, I handed him a dollar bill, and he gave me a quarter back as I walked out through the front door. My car was parked beneath the cool shade of a huge old Oak across the street, and I felt like I had just made the finest deal of the day! I thought to myself, “Hell, I bet I could bake gingerbread cookies, soft ones like the best I’ve ever tasted!”
Some estate sale weekends, I don’t end up finding anything worth bringing home, but then others… you just never know. And it doesn’t have to be something big or spectacular, because more times than not, as almost always is the case, it’s the little things each day that make you happiest.