Homemade Graveyard

Yard saling in North Carolina with the family last weekend, we ended up just outside Littleton at an estate sale that lived up to the name. Not the usual assumption of grandeur, but as Webster’s defines “estate”: “the assets and liabilities left by a person at death.”



The opposite of grandeur, it was a modest cream-colored 2 bedroom house with a falling down barn in the back. We parked and were greeted by two men of about 60, sitting in the shade and observing the bustle of customers. One grinned and asked if I’d brought the baby to sell, so I hugged little Hank closer and said, “You couldn’t possibly afford him!” We all laughed.



On the back porch, filled with old tools, we were welcomed by an elderly woman who directed us inside, where women of all ages were arranging cookware, linens, every household good you can imagine. It did not take long to realize that these sellers were some deceased person’s family, and the merchandise was the departed’s remaining “assets,” from glass candy dishes to scuffed end tables to a plastic tote of half-used lotions and shampoo. 



As I entered the living room she was in front of me, her wrinkled face, looking to be about 90, framed on the wall above a table laid out with a lifetime of bakeware. A woman old enough to be her daughter sat in a green recliner in one corner and immediately began cooing at the baby, who smiled coyly as she asked his name and age and informed him in elevated sing-song that he was the cutest baby ever. Then in a normal tone she me her Mama loved babies and that they’d just sold the swing that every family member had been rocked in as a baby, from her brothers and sisters to the latest great-grandkids. 



Then she nodded to an empty gray recliner beside me. “That was her chair, where she sat every day.” My mind filled in her stooped form, smiling up at Hank, waiting for me to pass him into her outstretched arms. I felt the joy of generations that had passed an afternoon in the doting comfort of her lap.



Her outline faded as fast as the glassware and utensils being carried out by strangers, an established household dissipating into scavenging hands.


We carried out our own share, a glass baking dish with a lid and a fancy silver serving stand. As we walked along the edge of the field towards the car, we passed a 30×30 patch of ground with two rows of gravestones, some standing smooth and straight with names engraved, some just slim rough gray rectangles leaning out of the ground. Though my mother-in-law remarked at how creepy it seemed, my first thought was the profound security of having the ones you love with you forever, the “estate” not just the bustle of the living but the ancestry quietly rooted in the very land beneath the busy feet. 



And this legacy of bones, would it now be tallied in the “liability” column? For how could one buy or sell the bodies of a family? Would they be dug up and scattered as so many forks and ashtrays? Is this how we live now, our eye only to our own narrow present? Or is this the nature of the past, to crumble and be carried away by passing winds?