Estate Sale Stampede

The Estate Sale signs suddenly turned a shady, sleepy street into a stadium parking lot after a home team loss. 

The Trough of Zero Value
Geoffrey's precious collection of heirloom crystal inherited from her mother and grandmother.  Proudly, prominently displayed in a very expensive display case.  We heard 'the kids' were selling it all off.  And this news struck us as painful and melancholy.  Both her surviving children are well-off, and doubtless have large, expensive, probably ostentatious houses.  And probably 2 OR 3 car garages.  By which I mean, oh come on, take it and store it somewhere?!  Your children or your grandchildren may really want it, knowing as we do that fashions change.  As a crystal sugar bowl ages, turns 100 or 150, it will "suddenly" becomes more precious and intriguing. 

If I was a wise person, what would I glean from all this? On the bookcase next to my bed, I have several very pretty gold medals my Grandmother Webb won at rifle matches when she was dating my grandfather. (And probably during the early years of their marriage?)  When I look at them, from time to time, I smile and think of her -- how spirited and energetic she was.  She was "a force."  Pretty and stylish and smart and funny.  

She was executor for the estate of a good friend, Carol Tate.  Carol and Andy.  In their stylish red sports car, top down, she, a large woman with a black lace scarf looped over her head to keep her hair in place, he, small, energetic, with a rakish mustache and goatee.  Originally from Canada? How on earth did they get here?  How did my grandparents come to know them?  I want to say that she had been a ballerina?  Prodigious intellect.  Books of hers with her handwriting in the margins. Fine manners.  My grandmother ended up with a small wicker suitcase of Carol's things, which I was asked to sort through to select anything I might want.  So next to my grandmother's medals, is a marvelous and utterly mysterious broach.  Beveled glass and brass around the portraits of two venerable gentlemen.  Two-sided, you could wear it so that you show off one.  Then the next day, the other.  I have NO idea who they are.  Or how old it is.  I assume it was hers?  Maybe it was his relatives? 

I do treasure it.  But I do so without it evoking dense layers of family mythology.  For me, they represent the volumes of things gone by, and in the end, the mystery and randomness of it all.  And since I, like she, am childless, I don't have anyone to pass it along to. 

Nanny's (Ruth Douglas Webb's) target shooting medals, and
the enigmatic two-sided miniature portrait brooch from
the estate of Carol Tate. 

Photo: Nanny, Dad (David B. Webb) and Sharon Rice Webb
taken outside the Webb's Wholesale Nursery Inc. office
April 30, 1999.