To walk through an estate sale and finger the wares—as I’ve been doing regularly since I was a teenager—is to commune with the departed. If you’re paying attention, you can put together a story about who they were.
You often enter an estate sale through the garage. This makes sense, because a garage is a liminal space between the indoors and outdoors, the least personal place to start. You peruse tables of grimy tools. Boxes of holiday decorations. Some dusty camping equipment. Gardening implements. Maybe a few plants. But things get more interesting quickly. Through the back door that this home’s residents probably used every single day, you enter the kitchen to find the contents of the cupboards piled atop the counters where they prepared thousands of dinners. Deeper, into the living room and the bedroom, you can sometimes even see the imprint their butts made on the sofa or the bed. In the bathroom, the unused toothpaste they bought in bulk. All the while, you’re building a narrative of who this person was, until you exit through the garage again. The jewelry and silver is usually on a table near the checkout, removed from its longtime context on top of the dresser or in the dining room hutch. It’s okay to skip it: The most financially valuable things are usually the least interesting.
And then, depending on the sticker price, you can approach the till and purchase a piece of this person’s story to bring into your own home, where it will become a part of the quiet narrative you are writing just by living. The tiny green enamel pots that hold the plants that line your windowsill. The electric-blue casserole dish you use to serve your friends at your 37th birthday brunch. The thick cotton napkins you dab at the side of your mouth while slurping soup in front of the television.
Do these things spark joy? Is the mundane supposed to spark joy?
Somehow, I don’t think that’s the point.