Estate Sales_万象城体育官方网_万象城体育-【app下载】

megan.savage1
Thu, 22 May 2025 17:00:16 +0000
Alchemy

There are a lot of things in the US that surprise a foreigner, such as a cleaning product powered by another cleaning product; drive-through banking; the ban on Kinder Surprise; Fahrenheit and the imperial systems; and, for a person from a land of five months of winter, the concept of a Snow Day.

That being said, the most fascinating thing to me is an estate sale. I find myself constantly checking the websites that announce the dates, and if there’s a good one coming up, it becomes the most exciting day of the week. I explain it to my friends back home in a morbid way– I say I am on a hunt for dead people’s stuff.

I’ve always loved a good sale. For a post-Soviet person, a brand name product has an almost magical status. My grandfather might believe that the “Golden Billion” is plotting evil schemes to turn Russia into an oil pump and nothing more (I argue with him that the Russian government does so successfully by itself, but with no luck). Still he cherishes the American-made Levis he got at the fall of the Soviet Union and dresses like an Ivy League graduate, despite living in the equivalent of a studio apartment in a mass-produced housing complex. I get a thrill holding Bottega Venetta shoes that don’t quite fit because this desire to look like I have means is instinctual.

I love peeking into people’s houses. I love thinking about the decor that people choose. When I look at their stuff, I peek into their souls.

Why did this person collect model trains? Was their grandfather a railroad engineer?

What was the reasoning behind all of the geese and chickens? Is that nostalgia for the simplicity of farm life? I am told it was a decoration trend in the eighties. It’s intriguing.

Why did this person have twenty-five books on the art of telling jokes? Were they told that they were critically unfunny? Did they try to become the soul of the party in a particularly scholarly way? Were they threatened by the success of the class clown?

I look at all the places people traveled to. This family loved cruises. That family must have been to Hawaii at least a thousand times judging by their trinket collection and abundance of Hawaiian shirts. Maybe it was their honeymoon spot, and they came back every year to recapture the magic. Or maybe they bought into an unbreakable timeshare agreement and decided to fully commit to the bit. Maybe they were just fetishizing the culture like a man who buys a Katana and imagines a submissive wife who squeals like an anime character. But there’s no fun in this explanation, so I pretend it’s something else.

When I left home it was abrupt. I didn’t plan on leaving for a long time. I foolishly assumed that he (the one who does the deciding in Russia) would understand what a colossal mistake the war was, and the madness would stop. I didn’t have the opportunity to pack a lot. I didn’t get to pack my great-grandmother’s plates which had a little stamp on the back that translated to “communal nutrition,” or her set of mid-century red drinking glasses. I didn’t get to pack the Russian classics book collection that my grandparents got from the Soviet government in exchange for recycling paper. Back home, I lived in my great-aunt’s apartment, my desk had once been my mother’s desk. It was all a story. I had to leave it. Even the dried flowers from my wedding bouquet.

I took some stuff: my grandmother’s leather jacket; a couple of her dresses; the suit jacket my mom bought in London in ‘96, where she got me my first English books, and her purse with a world map print. When I wear these things, I feel like I am still part of something. I guess that’s why I get excited when I come home from an estate sale with a trinket box? that was made in the Soviet Union—something that five years ago I would have found tacky, but now it feels like a piece that connects me to something.

I get excited when I see a photo of Prague at an estate sale, because I too was in Prague, teaching Russian—back when my compatriots were seen as just strange and not yet evil. I take home a vase made in Portugal because I went there once with my parents (when we saved up to travel for fun, not for survival). It’s like I have this memory represented somewhere here in the US.

I take home a table that has nothing to do with me, my life, or whatever I did before, but it has a story, and now I am a part of this story too. I am not just a blank slate in a new country; I am sitting at the table other people used to sit at, used to have their breakfast at before their children went to school and they went to their jobs, used to have guests over, used to fight and love, used to be. Now, I will continue doing all of this at this table, and maybe, if I am lucky, my children will do the same.

One day, maybe, some other immigrant will walk around my estate sale, and will try to piece together Russian trinkets; graphic t-shirts; biographies of political dissidents Italian crime bosses, and supermodels; cheetah-print pillows; a poster saying “vicious trollop” under a red lipstick. They will love this table and take it home.