Yard Sale Table

This weekend, my sister and I had a yard sale, so we were up at 5 on Saturday morning to greet the early birds, who were there by 7 a.m. Even though the sale didn’t officially start until 8, everyone who has ever held a yard sale knows that time means nothing to people on the hunt.

And on the hunt they were, hungry as rabbits in an arugula patch. Looking for stuffstuffstuff and stuffstuffstuff we had…aplenty. I wondered as I wandered around my house last week how I have ever managed to accumulate so much and took a merciless, grim-faced joy in tossing things into boxes and shopping bags to take to my sister’s yard and hopefully, never see again.

But I must admit that when one of the hunters stood across the card table from me with a hand full of quarters and tight-fisted dollars, ready to buy the fireplace screen from my long past married chapter or a book I bought in England thirty years ago about herbs or the long-legged fabric angel I won in a Yankee Swap or the wooden Jamaican vase that’s collected dust in the cabinet for ages or the Mexican tiles from an 80’s trip to Puerto Vallarta and never used…I felt a twinge in my heart, a last-second misgiving, and wanted to snatch the item back and say, “I’m sorry. I was wrong. There’s a mistake here. You can’t have it!”

And that night, I woke up around 2, the ghosts of apartments and houses and all their furnishings, all their rooms, swirling in my mind, the memories piling up like the now empty cardboard boxes under the tables. There is space now in the attic, the cellar, the bookshelves, the closets…and that’s good, I know that’s good…but there is an emptiness in my heart when I wonder where that long-legged Yankee swap angel is now or the Martha Stewart hors d’oeuvres cookbook inscriped by a friend long gone, or the tennis racket that can tell a whole love story…but only to me.

Maybe that’s why stuff matters…maybe that’s why we’re all, in varying degrees, hunters.

My friend David and I went to Newport a week or so ago to celebrate the first sunny day we’d had in over a week and the decidedly unofficial first day of spring. What a wonder it is to take off your coat and cast it into the back seat! To jam your gloves into the weary coat’s pockets. To feel like you’ve lost a few years, a few pounds, regained something flirtatious, fickle, alive…even if you’re wearing a sweater over a top and a skirt over jeans and walking shoes.

Newport smiled back at us with our cameras and reveled in our ooohs and aaahs at its old houses built so long ago by men with names like Jacob and Jeremiah, Silas and Samuel. These are not the mansions of Bellevue (those are a whole other story) but the simple square structures of the seafarers and their wives.

Life would be good here, I think, living in one of these crooked houses with the sea air shaking the windows in January, wafting the curtains in July. No doubt the salty ancestors of these houses rattle around the attics, closets and cellars of these houses and are frequent guests at tea or cocktail hour.

The only thing that would have made this day absolute perfection would have been a chance to go inside one of the old houses and have a good look around. Or sit in a chair by a wavery window, look out at the harbor and listen for the silent stories the old house might be inclined to tell.

Cellar Door

I try for a clean sweep down in the cellar of my house, but the broom is ancient (not to mention inexpensive), and its bristles are worn to a sharp slant. So I end up sweeping with the stubby ends. Down in my dark, damp cellar there is much to sweep: dead leaves, live spiders, stone dust, earth, webs, bugs, rusty screws, nails, shatters of clay pots and clumps of potting soil. I’ve always wanted a real basement in my house, but like a separate bathroom for guests and a mudroom, a clean, dry basement has eluded me. I look longingly at those subterranean family playgrounds with big-screen televisions, modular sofas and pool tables, or workshops with tools and saws and jars of nails, or even studios where the artist sits on a high stool under modern, squiggly lights with all the  flotsam of her art meticulously arranged on shelves behind her. These images are all dreams…life has given me since childhood cellars in the true sense of the word: always dark, always damp (often with dirt floors and empty coal bins), stone-walled, spider-flecked, web-spun…the kinds of cellars Freud believed dwell deep in the unconscious…where we are lost, alone, scared out of our wits, keeping company with pale ghosts and little brown mice.

Dream House

This is a little gray house with tiny rooms and a sagging roof nestled into a hillside that looks out to the headlands and the cold blue sea beyond. I am an Irish girl wearing a ruby petticoat under a brown tweed skirt, sturdy almost galumphy boots, and a warm moss-green sweater with worn elbows. This is my house, and the rooms have ceilings so low you have to stoop in the doorways. There is a sooted little fireplace in the sitting room with two wing chairs in front of it and golden reading lamps bent over the backs of each chair.

At night, when the wind off the sea howls round the corners of the little gray house with the sagging roof, I sit in one of the chairs and read old books that are fragrant with paste and lavender or scratch out lines of words with a jagged fountain pen in yellowed journals. Sometimes a friend takes his or her place beside me in the other wing chair, and we talk and listen to the sea wind and let the fire blaze and then die, waiting for the shadows to creep back into their corners, waiting for the first whisper of pale light to fall around our shoulders, waiting to begin again.