It’s painted a yellow which once might have been named “Sunrise Ocher,” but which has since muddied to what could only be called “Baby Poop.” Still, it’s the room which gets the best light and I’m always there at the time of day when the sunbeams are slanting through the windows, stirring the dust motes into full-on sparkle. Each time we sneezed our way through the house, I inevitably made my way down the hall to a back room which was once a pantry or a small sitting room or perhaps some little boy’s bedroom.
I had been here several times before, helping my wife load our car with coffee tables, glass lamps (non-poodle), and ottomans leaking horsehair stuffing.
The tables laden with Christmas ornaments (angels missing a wing), ceramic poodle lamps, and stacks of LPs (Jim Reeves, anyone?) were laden with the litter from 1960s culture every month.
Every Saturday, she sold off pieces of past material lives for $1.25. Eleanor owned the early-20th-century house and used its rooms as a quasi-organized storage area for what had once been somebody’s family heirlooms. The mistress of this house on Granite Street didn’t even live here. Why buy a new sheet of price-tag stickers every four weeks when you can just keep the tables in place and pull the tarps off the caved-in boxes of cake decorating kits, Kenny Rogers cassette tapes and sad, ratty baby clothes which didn’t sell in June and probably won’t sell in July? It’s all about garage-sale economics, buster. Folks in this town are so thrifty, they even recycle their garage sales. It was like any number of perpetual “garage sales” that make monthly appearances in the Butte classified ads. I’d been to this house on Granite Street before. I was like Nancy Drew out to save the whales. I would get to the bottom of this mystery-why nobody wanted these books on their shelves anymore-and, what’s more, I would rescue the victims of neglect. Other than that, I was 100 percent amateur detective, on the hunt for orphaned, abandoned, no-longer-loved books. Except that I was 48 years old, had a penis, and lacked a boyfriend named Ned waiting for me at the curb in his jalopy. Combing through the back room of the old lady’s house, picking through cardboard boxes of books that sighed puffs of dust, I felt like Nancy Drew.
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