Estate sales here back East should be advertised as Time Tunnel Trips. I tell Tom that I go to estate sales with him to tour the old houses, not really to buy anything. He sort-of understands that.
I shouldn't even go at all. I step away from these much-loved, non-altered, early 1900's houses and it takes hours to shake the lust from my heart. When I walk up the stairs of these old farmhouses or Victorians, I'm catapulted into dreams normally reserved for nighttime. You know, the kind where you walk around in a large, strange house just opening doors and stepping into rooms you've never seen before.
Well, it's like that.
Usually I don't even see the knick-knacks displayed with price tags upon tables. And I pay little attention to the estate sale 'vultures' as I not-so-fondly call them, the harried people out to find a re-sell-able bargain. No, I wander zombie-like from floor to floor soaking up the pleasant vibes reverberating from the walls. The leftover aura from days-gone-by when housekeeping was a respected art and a happy family was all that mattered.
Through dazed eyes I see yellow kitchens with their original glass-fronted cabinet doors. (If there's an ironing board cupboard or a breakfast nook, it takes me days to recover.) There's often green and red wooden-handled utensils beside the knock-off Fiestaware and rolling pins. And I think about the hands, now stilled, which used those things. Then through pocket doors I wander through the three-windowed dining room and barely scan the dishes and embroidered linens on the covered table. No, I choose to peek into the cute little closet with the file cabinet beneath the stairs.
Sometimes there's a music room/ sewing room with a piano and a closeted sewing machine desk. I look at the old sheet music and the walls almost echo with a family singing. The sconces over the fireplace, the overstuffed chairs from the 1950's, the books in the built-in cases where they've been sitting for eons~~my eyes miss none of it.
By now I'm lost in nostalgia and feeling transported, alone, though the vultures are rushing fast-motion up the stairs past me. But I creep up slowly, touching the rail which the woman of the house must have touched twelve-thousand times. At the top,there are green and yellow formals hanging over the bedroom doors with hat boxes just below. And the rooms are painted pink, robin's egg blue or are wall-papered in stripes and have fuzzy worn carpet. The largest bedroom has a little bay-window-room where there are two chintz-covered chairs beside a table spread with vintage magazines and black-and-white photos in cheap gold metal frames. And books stuffed into closet shelves. And a chenille bedspread. Usually by now I am wondering if people will walk through my home like this when I am gone.
There are 1940's toys in the attic and piles and piles of books, games and dress-up clothes. And a baby walker, the old kind with red, blue and green far-from-hygienic wooden beads. It's in the attic where I usually wonder if anyone helping with this estate sale once played with these toys as a child or if they were the ones who used flour-and-water paste in the scrapbooks in the corner.
I usually save the basement for last, because they push me over the edge. Basements, that is. Not the vultures (though they have been known to get rough). Often the basement is tiled 1950's style and there's an old kitchenette complete with enameled stove,refrigerator and a wringer washer. And a couch from the 1960's, oil paintings and paneled walls. I imagine teen parties in the days of Buddy Holley~~it's impossible not to see all that in my mind.
If I buy anything before my return to this decade, it's usually just a trinket, maybe a small black ceramic elephant. I purchase it to remind me of a walk through a house and all the lovely visions I had there.
Just a little something to help me recall a family, especially a woman, who I'll never know. A woman with an unknown story, who lived out her married-life in one house, with one man. And who I am almost sure, did so, happily.
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Quote of the Day: So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland
Warning~~This entry may make some intellectual-types scream.
Today the kids in our town went back to school.
It's funny. Even after being out of school for 26 years, I still celebrate this day. I hug to myself the fact that I don't have to return to school.
Oh, the bliss, the freedom, the joy! Balloons and confetti and cake--oh my!
Now, many adults happily return to college, and well, more power to them. But I'll let them have their late-night study sessions and early-morning exploding-out-the-door, their brain-squeezing exams, their I-wouldn't-want-my-daughter-to-read-these English Lit. books, their lectures from liberal-minded professors, their vulgar language in the hallways, their added stress, microwave meals, lack of sleep and no time for friendship.
Call me backward, ignorant or lazy, but I'll gladly pass on all of the above.
Give me, instead, wide open calendar spaces, time to think, and learning on my own in peace and quiet. Here is one college drop-out who married after her freshman year and never looked back. My Prince Charming came along on the proverbial white horse, scooped me up, and rescued me from my college misery. He then took me to the Land of Happily Ever After (you know, the place feminists say doesn't exist) and here we are today, older, wiser, happier.
All of this is why I celebrate the first day of school. And again, I am grateful.
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Quote of the Day: An optimist is the human personification of spring.
Susan J. Bissonette
A group of cat friends live in our house, adding a whole other world inside our walls.
Lennon is the biggest of these pals--we tease that he's the size of a white-and-taffy-colored pony. He can even do dog tricks which amaze our friends. But sadly, he's also an honest-to-goodness fraidy cat. It's an embarrassing sight to see this huge cat fearfully running down the hall from the much-smaller, Oreo, the relative newcomer.
Oreo is a maniac. He wants to play 18 hours a day and each time I release him from our daughter's room upstairs, he first takes his fishing pole toy into his mouth (the feathery end) and head held high, drags the toy tarump-tarump-tarump down the stairs. Always he reminds me of a toddler who must take his stuffed animal with him by land or sea or air. Just mention the word 'toy' to Oreo and he meows in hope that we will swing his fishing pole around for him to chase. We must encourage him to rest from playing-- he lacks the common sense to do so himself.
At 14, Skittles is our oldest. She's part Siamese and still has a kittenish sort of face, and she's a bonafide example of a lap cat. She naps at the end of my bed while I watch tv and you'd think her back was made of velcro. She must always be touching me, at least a little. Literally hundreds of hours she's sat on Tom's lap in the recliner all down the years. I'll always see her there in my mind, even after she is gone.
McCartney, sad to say, is rather average. Not the fraidy cat her brother, Lennon, is, but close. Fluffy, black and white, her green eyes are huge. She's always the first at the bowl of food and the last to leave. She waddles after our little red laser light with reckless abandon and finally, at age 7, she learned to sit up for her treats.
Brother Lennon got the brains, Cartney got the fluff.
Two other cats have we, or rather, these two along with the aforementioned Oreo, belong to our daughter who lives upstairs. Ginger and Farrah are grey sisters who are as different as the proverbial night and day. When Farrah looks at anyone, she stands on her toes and squints her eyes-- you would swear she's smiling. She's known as The Princess.
But Ginger--huh! Ginger is psychotic. I'd never dare try to hold her and if she lets me pat her head, I must always be ready to draw my hand away lest she bite it on a whim. But her redeeming feature is that she watches for Naomi to come home from work each day and runs to the kitchen to greet her. But then, if Naomi picks her up, she yowls menacingly. There is no figuring-out Ginger.
Our three downstairs cats end each day in their own room. Years ago, their nighttime play got too intense and a Victorian bowl and pitcher were smashed, so they've spent their nights since in this bedroom. I call them in a falsetto voice, "Time for bed!" and they come walking in a row into this room where they will spend the night. But on sweltering nights I leave them to roam the house and they look up at me as if to say, "Aren't you going to put us to bed?". Then next morning, they walk with heads held high. "Aren't we hot stuff to have stayed out all night!", they say.
Funny how so much can go on beneath one roof.
Funny-sad how much we miss when we choose to worry about the strife in the world outside and let it blacken our homelife. I don't want to overlook a single blessing. When I stand before God someday, I want to be able to say I saw, truly saw, each blessing He sent my way.
Already I'm getting a head start on thanking Him.
*****
Quote of the Day: For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use being anything else.
Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965),
