Seller’s Remorse

Wisconsin Estate Sale, Antiques, Collectables, Linens, Furniture. Quality Household Miscellaneous. Pole Barn Full of Tools. Everything Must Go! Friday,
Saturday and Sunday. 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to write one of those ads. But let me tell you, it’s pretty hard to make the words “household miscellaneous” jump off the page. And I had a personal stake in it, too. My parents, their sale. Last November, and I’m still having nightmares about it. But when I catch a case of the sweats at 3 a.m., it’s not my father’s illness I’m thinking about, or the inevitability of his physical decline. I’m not thinking about my mother’s heart, either, which breaks a little more each day as she tries to ease her husband’s suffering. I think about those things in the daylight, in my world, where it seems safer: A world of belligerent teens and gassy old dogs, of crackpot schemes, and my own husband, who I’m beginning to realize just might love me as much as he says he does.

In the daylight, as tough as things can be sometimes, it’s easier to put life’s trials into perspective. It’s possible to look at them more as rites of passage. But the thought process that I employ to force my fears into submission dissolves as soon as I hit the sheets. In dreams I’m racing through a field of lidless Tupperware containers, chasing after buyers and screaming “ONLY FIFTY CENTS! FIFTY CENTS! FIFTY CENTS!”

I get it. It’s the futility of the situation that haunts me. In sleep, it’s just transferred to a related event of tangible effort. I can’t make my dad better, and I can’t take away my mother’s pain. Any more than I can put a dollar value on a rusted coffee can full of nails.

I decided to run my parents’ estate sale when I found out that the only person who ran sales in their community would demand 35 percent of the take. I did a mental tally of what they had left at their house, and in the words of Ed Kruse, well, the hell with that. Any and all profits could stay with my folks. I took a week off from work to get the sale ready. Dear friends and family rallied to the cause. Heavy lifting was done. Coffee was made and drunk. Eye-catching groupings of mom’s tchotchkes were arranged and priced. Joyce, a church friend of my mother’s, enlisted the help of her handy husband Dwayne, and he personally knocked signs in the grass along the highway, five miles in each direction so that no one could miss them.

One of my biggest concerns was the pole barn. It was, indeed, full of tools—some old, many new and never used. It was also full of dreaded Halloween bugs, those nasty ladybug wannabes that crawl into every last crack and corner and never ever ever die. They go dormant, like Cher. There was no way I could hope to empty the barn—much less run outside to staff it anytime someone wanted to buy a pitchfork or a mower. The day before the sale began, a wiry little man arrived early in a big truck. Delbert said he’d heard there were some tools for sale, and wanted to know if he could take an early look. I walked him out to the barn and told him I’d give him a deal. Five hundred bucks if he hauled everything away: my dad’s landscaping tools, his fishing tackle, the jigsaw and workbench. And the bugs. There was a moment of silence while Delbert calculated the merchandise versus the job at hand. Then he turned to me and said: “I ’spect I’ll take it.”

The sale was a huge success. I worked in a white heat, re-arranging wares after each wave of shoppers swept through. In the waning hours of the last day, the new owner of the house showed up. A single man with a classic car collection. My sister Tracy had brought a bottle of champagne, which we poured into paper cups. The three of us stood out on the deck, and toasted good old times and new ones to come. The man told us how nice that pole barn was going to be for his cars, and I laughed in relief, thinking of Delbert.

We cleaned up, ran a vacuum, said our goodbyes. I was the last to leave, but not the last to see the place. Tracy would come back in two weeks with our mom, for the closing. I’m still coming to grips with the fact that everything must go.