Archive for March 29th, 2009

This afternoon while returning from picking up my son from a scout camping trip, we drove past an Estate Sale sign. My husband, the bargain hunter, noted the sign had been updated to  “1/2 off Sunday.”  This was all it took to get him to follow a curving path around the subdivision to where a group of a dozen or more vehicles was parking in front of a modest brick house on a quiet street, practical from the exterior, and on the interior, much the same.

A kitchen displayed various pots, pans and bakeware and also contained a nice gas stove, not for sale. The person who lived here had spent a lot of time cooking, from the look of the tinfoil covers under the burners, the well used color of the tupperware.

In the back of the house, it was clear that a young male artist had been living in the rear bedroom, where a large, unfinished canvas landscape of a highway leading into prairie hills had been abandoned and splashed with white paint. Below, a row of Nikes, and in the closet, t-shorts with anime decals. A grandson?

In the front room, there were a selection of pantsuits — many of which were red — along with other clothes, only $1 each. In the middle bedroom I found a selection of girl’s dresses, including a pink gingham the right size for an eight year old with a yellowed white lace collar. I sighed, realizing it had once been a pretty dress but was now dated and worn. The person who had not been able to throw it away may have been remembering the child it represented. I’ve got things like that in my closet.

In a box by the rack of clothes was a type of headgear I’d never seen up close. I bent to pick one up. It was purple and white and covered with protective plastic, the shape of an oversized military forage cap with a large “P” on the front. It was a drum majorette’s hat from the 70′s. I imagined the girl who wore it, dancing in white boots, and the mother who watched, and it as she had the gingham dress.

I put the majorette’s hat back in the box. Pascal High School no longer draws students from South Hills; we’ve been redistricted to Southwest High School but this was archaological evidence that from the beginning it was not so.  I felt a sense of lang syne. Where were the artist and the drum majorette now? And the woman who liked to cook, who wore the red pantsuits? They seemed so close and yet so far away.

As I walked back out into the front yard under the shade of a large tree, my husband told me he’d found a perfect small desk for his bookbinding hobby. “Don’t know what it was for,” he said, but now it was a steal at $5. I looked at the back where a long thin opening ran along the back.

“It’s for the printer paper,” I pointed out. “You remember when the paper used to come in a long perforated roll.”

He nodded. Where had the desk fit into the family? I felt I knew them a little bit — except for a nagging question. What had happened to the dad?

Another long sigh. It was the 70′s after all. Perhaps he didn’t find the children and their interests as absorbing as the woman in red, and drifted away. There were so many like that.