More Garage Sale Angst (Patricia Potter)

The garage sale saga continues.

In my last blog, I discussed my inability to surrender even a minimal number of books to our gigantic community garage sale.

As one reply suggested, I should probably look elsewhere for merchandise. I had, after all, signed up for the event in the prospect of weeding out books. I had forked over my twenty dollars plus another twenty for four long tables.

Since my search for unwanted books among several thousand resulted in a grand total of six, I turned to other sources. Lots of places to look. Mainly in the boxes stored in my garage. My 96-six-year-old mother recently went into a nursing home, and my brother and I boxed ninety years of memories.

My brother and his brood have taken what they want, and I have taken some items for my own use, but there are still boxes and boxes of stuff I could not bear to throw away but no one else wanted.

I decided to look through them in my quest for saleable items for my four empty tables.

One large box contained hand-embroidered dish clothes, table cloths and napkins that were crafted by my grandmother three quarters of a century ago, along with a ceramic teapot and tray that lived in my parents’ various homes for the seventy-plus years my parents were married. I remember them well.

There are wonderful painted vases picked up on their travels, a stock pot of a kind that are no longer made and had been once the source of “real” chicken and dumplings. I’ve never made chicken and dumplings but there’s always tomorrow.

Another box reveals paintings that I remember from childhood, and a set of silver plated knives, forks and spoons reserved for Sundays. As I unwrap them and run my fingers over their used surfaces, I remember how much they meant to my parents. How proud they were of the sterling silver tongs, and the lovely old dishes, and the crystal desert plates.

Sell them to a stranger? It would be like selling my soul.

But what to do with them? I am of the paper and plastic generation. Paper napkins. Easy-to- wash plastic place mats. Microwave and dishwasher proof 21th Century materials.

I replace the stuff and try another box. This time photos. The treasure among them is a small but thick leather-bound photo album dating back to 1864, according to the cover. Carefully inserted in the pages are wonderful but mostly nameless portraits of people I assume are antecedents. Their generation is hinted at only through their clothes and hair, facial and other. Someone cared enough to keep that album one hundred and fifty years. How can I be the one that breaks that chain?

Then there are the photos of my mother as a child. There’s a picture of her from 1915 in a Martha Washington costume for a Fourth of July Parade. She still remembers that parade. The latter, of course, is not suitable for a garage sale but the photos bring back memories and regret that really no one in the family – other than me – is really interested. How many of those precious photos will be lost because there is no room, or no interest?

So what do you do when a member of your family has to downsize to one small room, and you are faced with preserving cherished belongings and photos that were so dear to them? I will try to keep them, along with the books, all the time knowing that I’m really leaving the problem to someone else, someone who probably won’t treasure every one of those embroidered – and yellowed – table cloths, and hundred- year-old photos of people I do not know.

I am open to suggestions, though. Really. Any help gratefully accepted.
Psychiatric advice as well.

In the meantime, the sale is looming.

I think I will offer my four tables and loan of my driveway to my neighbor who was even more dilatory than I in signing up. To his stuff, I’ll add my half a dozen books, two elderly lamps, and an old electric typewriter.

Or maybe I should rethink that electric typewriter.