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.

Graduation Day

In June, my sister and I traveled back to our hometown deep in the farmy lands of upstate New York for our nephew’s high school graduation. When the daisy arches were lifted over the heads of the Seniors in their caps and gowns and the band played Pomp and Circumstance, I was aware again how much our traditions and rituals ground us.

It has been years since my high school graduation and yet, that day, it seemed as if…in my heart at least…very little time had passed. I felt the thrill of it…the long white robe, the crazy hat that flattened the already fragile poof in my hair, the wild daisy-festooned arches over my head, the stirring notes of the processional, and the sense that something hugely important was taking place in my life.

I was seventeen that afternoon in June…had never seen an ocean or Paris, never seriously kissed a boy, never knew that I would come to love the arrangement of words on a page, had never cooked with real garlic, didn’t even have my license yet. But I knew, sitting up there on the stage, that a strange new landscape was taking form, and all that was comfortable and familiar was fading the way my vision had blurred in sixth grade and nothing was ever quite the same.

Mostly I was apprehensive about the beginnings, sad about the endings…homesick already for those seventeen growing-up years, for my friends, my house, my street, my town, my family. I always joked with my sister that just as I was getting the hang of it in high school, it was over. And that has been a recurrent theme: getting the hang of a job or a house or a city or a marriage…and then sometimes long before I was ready, it was over.

So when the Class of 2010 tossed those strange hats up into the air and the applause swept them to their feet, a beginning and an ending merged in one moment. We all bore witness to it. We all remembered.

Dream Dress Dreaming

Dream dresses look like this…I think this is a Vera Wang dress in her shop window on Manhattan’s upper East Side, but I can’t remember…all I know is that this dream dress is a web, a weaving, of dreams. To wear it, you would have to be tall, beautiful (but in a jolie-laid sort of way), accomplished (violin? poetry? venture capital? architecture, law? ballet?), well travelled, at least bi-lingual, financially secure, and probably vegetarian.

In short, perfect.

Most likely, this dress is a wedding dress to be worn once in an emerald garden or a sumptuous hotel or a glittering rooftop or the porch of the old family shingled house with the ocean beyond. And after that one magical occasion, perhaps passed on to an equally accomplished and beautiful daughter or hang forever in state in an upstairs guest room closet (all clean and sacheted, of course).

I look at the dream dress and I sense that it wishes otherwise…wants a different kind of future. Maybe something like this: to be worn on fresh Monday mornings while hanging out the sheets; or dancing in front of the fireplace on a mid-January night as the snow blankets the world; or apron-layered and rolling out a real pie crust; or driving in a perfectly ordinary car with the windows all down, headed west on a black October night; or making out in the front seat of that perfectly ordinary car by a dark green lake, the night fragrant with earth and iron and cornfields.

Maybe this dream dress makes its way to Port Clyde, Maine or Roslindale, Massachusetts or Honeoye Falls, New York or Quebec City or even Dublin or Venice or Paris or Tokyo. Or maybe it just stays put in its own back yard, happy there with the ordinary–the maples and cedars, the petunias, clover, and dandelions, the robins, the stray cats, the humming mowers and rusty swing-sets, the crooked snowmen and the barking dogs, the ordinary people, dreaming behind the square white windows of dresses such as this, of dreams all webbed and tangled in the ordinary living rooms of the heart.

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.