It is now ten days since I returned from Pittsburgh and the estate sale. What a process. Rosemary Dingle, an English lady with a troop of assistants, took over the sale and did a marvelous job at managing the chaos. "Full to overflowing" were her words for the house and its contents to be sold, even after I had cleared out all of the drawers and closets upstairs!
Even though the sale went very well, as estate sales go, and I had no real second-thoughts about what I kept and what I got rid of, the experience was excruciating. I sat in the neighbors' kitchen most of the time and watched items pour out of the house -- furniture into trucks, afghans over shoulders, bags and bags of who knows what going who knows where. People were lined up all the way down the driveway and into the street by 7:30 a.m., waiting to be let in. Cars came and went and were parked for blocks around the otherwise sleepy neighborhood. One of the neighbors estimated that five hundred people went through the house, just the first day of the sale. Then many people came back on Sunday for another round.
There were still things (mostly knicknacks) left at the end of the sale. Two thoughts hit me: one, the strangeness of seeing things go away that I had known my whole life; and two, how unpredictable it was to discover which objects held associations or memories. Neither of these qualities were in any way related to usefulness or attractiveness. Because I had been so deliberate and so thorough in sorting and thinking about the deacquisition process, I wasn't emotionally bothered by the "letting go" of things until I walked in after the last day of the sale and saw what hadn't sold, and what a mess it had all become. But the process continued, and the next person on the great chain of deacquistion quickly arrived, and his assistants loaded the rest of the stuff either onto a truck to go to flea markets or charity, or into garbage bags to be picked up at the curb.
Now the house is empty. My attention has shifted to Public Storage here in Pasadena (where the movers delivered the things we chose to keep), and to the stacks of papers, photos and miscellaneous stuff piling up all over the house that I still need to organize. Our own house has been neglected for a year and a half due to the magnitude of dealing with the Pittsburgh house and I am now hoping to get the focus back to the present, and our surroundings back to simplicity.
It is now ten days since I returned from Pittsburgh and the estate sale. What a process. Rosemary Dingle, an English lady with a troop of assistants, took over the sale and did a marvelous job at managing the chaos. "Full to overflowing" were her words for the house and its contents to be sold, even after I had cleared out all of the drawers and closets upstairs! 
Even though the sale went very well, as estate sales go, and I had no real second-thoughts about what I kept and what I got rid of, the experience was excruciating. I sat in the neighbors' kitchen most of the time and watched items pour out of the house -- furniture into trucks, afghans over shoulders, bags and bags of who knows what going who knows where. People were lined up all the way down the driveway and into the street by 7:30 a.m., waiting to be let in. Cars came and went and were parked for blocks around the otherwise sleepy neighborhood. One of the neighbors estimated that five hundred people went through the house, just the first day of the sale. Then many people came back on Sunday for another round. 
There were still things (mostly knicknacks) left at the end of the sale. Two thoughts hit me: one, the strangeness of seeing things go away that I had known my whole life; and two, how unpredictable it was to discover which objects held associations or memories. Neither of these qualities were in any way related to usefulness or attractiveness. Because I had been so deliberate and so thorough in sorting and thinking about the deacquisition process, I wasn't emotionally bothered by the "letting go" of things until I walked in after the last day of the sale and saw what hadn't sold, and what a mess it had all become. But the process continued, and the next person on the great chain of deacquistion quickly arrived, and his assistants loaded the rest of the stuff either onto a truck to go to flea markets or charity, or into garbage bags to be picked up at the curb. 
Now the house is empty. My attention has shifted to Public Storage here in Pasadena (where the movers delivered the things we chose to keep), and to the stacks of papers, photos and miscellaneous stuff piling up all over the house that I still need to organize. Our own house has been neglected for a year and a half due to the magnitude of dealing with the Pittsburgh house and I am now hoping to get the focus back to the present, and our surroundings back to simplicity.
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I'm not a regular reader, and I hope I'm not intruding...but I, too, am facing the prospect of an estate sale in Pittsburgh. I am considering using Rosemary Dingle to handle the sale, and wondered if you'd be willing to give me some more information about her.
ReplyDeleteThanks in advance. My e-mail is kittencat3@charter.net.