Estate Sale

On a dark, drizzly Saturday morning I decided to go early to the estate sale of a friend who is moving from Rochester. The streets were mostly deserted as I pulled up in front of her house at 7am to join several other cars. I wasn’t familiar with the procedure, but the guy behind me motioned to me to walk behind his car, and I found the man handing out temporary numbers. I got number 7 – not bad! When I asked him how long he'd been there, he said since midnight, but he'd hired someone to be there at 7:30pm, just in case. The person who got #2 arrived at 1:30am…

So here's how this works. The sale opens at 10am, and just before that, the manager of the sale arrives and hands out entry numbers, to reduce chaos. In the meantime, eager beavers (mostly dealers and collectors) arrive early and have an informal numbering system. The first person to arrive hands out temporary numbers, which then get exchanged for real numbers, at 9am. This system was definitely created by a man, since you are not supposed to just get a number and leave and return at 9am. (I smartly drank nothing before going, but could you imagine a woman creating a system that required waiting in a car for hours?)

awaiting the number exchange...

I took some reading to catch up on, and the 2 hours passed reasonably quickly. At 8am several people started lurking about so I went back to the numbers guy, who explained that some of them were asking permission to leave for a restroom break, which he permitted (I had been warned that sometimes you forfeit your number if you do that, but this guy was being generous). He also explained that at 9am, after I exchanged my temporary number for a real one, I could leave and come back at 10am. So complicated!

It was a bit sad to see so many of my friend’s personal belongings, including items she’d collected from traveling the world, set out with little price tags, for complete strangers to handle. It made me ponder what will happen to my own treasures when I’m gone, and regret what happened to many of my parents’ when they died. Each object has a story – a story that generally dies when it passes hands, or worse yet, ends up as landfill.

Was it worth it? Well, I got what I went for, and then some. I’d been alerted earlier in the week to a cast iron garden bench that was for sale at a reasonable price, not knowing who the owner was. When the person managing the sale explained the circumstances and address, so we could go look at it before committing, I new exactly to whom it belonged. We checked it out, and of course wanted to purchase it, but the sale manager said since it had been pictured in the on-line catalog, we couldn’t take it then, but he’d put a ‘sold’ sticker on it and we could pick it up at the sale. He also indicated that there might be some bidding on it, which I thought was peculiar for an estate sale. Luckily, when I entered the house, I made a bee-line out the back, where the bench was now priced 50% higher; maybe someone else had also expressed interest? Of course it had no ‘sold’ sticker because of the increase, but I made an executive decision (I didn’t want to risk losing it to someone else by taking the time to check with my husband). I also bought a large ceramic planter, and a couple of tchotchkes as gifts for friends (I have made a note to ask my friend about their stories). I will think of her fondly whenever I pass the bench and planter in my garden, and hope she’s doing well in her new home in Seattle.