The views along the scenic routes of country roads sometimes surprise me – like walking into a teenager’s room unprepared. On one country road the other day, I passed by a lovely old house. Junk littered the entire front yard.
I saw snippets of chicken wire, a tire here, a wing chair there, a refrigerator resting on its side, and bathroom sink half filled with water. Plants grew in an old bathtub. Near some broken tools and motor parts lay a Raggedy Ann doll with only one leg. If the people living there intended to throw these things away, they didn’t throw them very far. The residents seemed to deliberately keep these castoffs right in their front yard, as though they placed them in limbo to await a final disposition.
I’ve seen yards like this over the years. I believe the litter is more than just trash; it has significance, a meaning. It helps to look at junk the way archaeologists regard heaps of rubble: with curiosity and an open mind.
The discarded objects in the yard had certainly been useful, valuable in their prime; it was time and wear that eventually claimed them. Why the stuff was finally remanded to the front yard and not the dump raises questions. Perhaps the goods were retained as a memorial to the many hours of companionship and service they provided, the way we save mementoes of family and friends, like baby shoes, locks of hair and photographs. The yard reminded me of the tiny family graveyards one also sees in the country – fenced-in cemeteries near the main house, fresh flowers growing in the plot, and miniature American flags flying next to a standard of the American Legion Post. The family’s faithful departed, long gone to their reward, were to remain interred close by, only a stones throw from the front door of the house. Out of service, but not out of sight.
Nothing lasts forever. Implements of daily living cease to be viable because of changing needs and circumstances. Yet, I find it difficult letting go of anything with which I’ve had long history. I grow fiercely attached to things. I experience periodic urges to clean up, to pitch the old stuff out, but then I find I can’t make myself do it. It’s too hard to let go.
Sixty-five years ago I received the gift from my mother. It was a tie she bought in Bermuda. It was wide and silky decorated with various earth tones. I loved it. But I haven’t worn it for years since it’s long out of fashion. With gritted teeth I recently tossed it out.
I’m convinced that familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, it fosters endearment and attachment. Like ageing wine, certain objects mellow over time and assume a virtue they never had when they were brand new or recently acquired. In fact, time increases the value of something as insipid as an old pump handle, Prince Albert tobacco cans or green Coke bottles. Such articles sell like extortionately priced hot cakes in early attic stores. Finding old junk when it’s the throwaways of our own past, even though it’s ravaged by age, is like meeting an old girl or boy friend that we’ve not seen since childhood. Old thoughts return to swim for a time in the bittersweet pools of nostalgia. Memories are similar to littered front yards; we keep close at hand what long ago we had to surrender.
But the junk in antique and early attic stores tells me that there are certain times, like my tie, we let things go once and for all. Sometimes it happens after a death in the family. The stuff appears regularly at yard sales.
A death in the family often releases the sealed and forgotten contents of the attic or basement into the hands, first of relatives, and then to parties who express some genuine affection for the article. The death of the relative marks the end of an era, and invests certain items with more meaning, some with new significance, like the deceased’s letters or a family bible. Other effects lose all value, like the deceased’s comb or toothbrush. It’s much easier to relinquish the relics of our sentiments to kin and caring friends rather than to total strangers. We want to know someone will care for them. Funeral services reflect this, too, when they assure mourners at their time of loss that it’s okay to surrender their loved one, to give them up; they’re in good hands, God’s hands.
Yard sales are important community rites; there one sees the resurrection of junk after being buried in attics or lying in front yard limbos. Neighbors join together to sell the unused effects accumulated over years. It’s a surrender of the past. Yard sales won’t necessarily generate much income, but there’s comfort and closure in knowing that your neighbor now values a can opener or mix master that you’ve used for forty years. “I remember my grandmother had one just like this,” is a frequent comment.
Yard sales create a sense of community, as wakes do. There’s an appreciation of life’s fragility and also its continuity in the small transactions of yard sales. There is a sense of generativity, that matter isn’t destroyed, only transformed by time, and then passed along into new hands. There is life after attics and basements.
Ezekiel once prophesied how our old bones would one day walk around again. I can almost imagine them holding rag dolls in their arms, cooking with Calumet Baking Powder, riding bright red Flexible Flyer sleds in the snow, and sitting by pot belly stoves. And on Saturday night, before going out to see the moving picture show, they’d bathe in porcelain bathtubs with gold colored claw feet, the kind of junk we see in someone’s front yard, in an early attic store, or at a yard sale, waiting for a new home.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
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