Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light by Helen Ellis

Author:Helen Ellis [Ellis, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

The Early Birds showed up at 6:30 in the morning because they wanted the Christmas china, but Mama had already pulled it because my forty-something-year-old little sister had laid claim. Elizabeth had Googled the Christmas china and discovered it was the most valuable thing we had for sale in our driveway. Besides, it was sentimental. How many pieces of red velvet cake had we eaten off that mint-condition service for twelve?

Mama also pulled her father’s collection of vintage medicine bottles. The five boxes of more than a hundred green, blue, and brown bottles had been professionally packed thirty years ago when my family had moved from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham, and they had been parked in Mama’s walk-in closet ever since. I was in college when they’d moved, so strange men in coveralls had boxed up my teenage bedroom.

Mama’s instructions to the movers had been: “Pack everything and don’t ask questions.”

Years later, when I opened a box marked “Older Girl’s Bedroom,” I found two full beer cans I’d hidden. The beer cans were each rolled in two sheets of brown paper and padded with the same care as Great-grandmama Lulu’s centuries-old cut glass.

We were not selling Lulu’s centuries-old cut glass at this garage sale.

My parents were planning to downsize from their four-bedroom house, where I’d never lived, so I had few sentimental attachments. I am attached to my parents, but when it comes to their stuff (and their parents’ stuff, and their parents’ parents’ stuff), I can take it or leave it.

My sister is more of a saver than I am. She loves my parents so much she wanted to move them to California into a tiny house in her backyard. All their stuff wasn’t going to fit in a tiny house, so I had arrived in Alabama from New York City to help in the purge for what was meant to be the mother of all garage sales.

Papa said to me, “I tried to sneak in a couple of Lulu’s vases, but your mother pulled them. Some stuff’s too good for the garage sale people.”

The Garage Sale People are people who want to profit from your poor life decisions. They’re grifters out to pull your gigantic plastic bin of red-sauce-stained Tupperware right out from under you. They want to resell your prom dress when metallic lamé comes back into style.

To test your faith, they show up in church T-shirts and Jesus jewelry. To play on your sympathies they point to their arthritic mother-in-law, who they’ve left cooking in the car with the windows cracked. They drive an unmarked van up to your curb an hour and a half early with a couple of weight-lifting “nephews” and the hubris to bring a checkbook. They want you to think that they’re doing you a favor.

But they don’t fool Papa. Papa has always been ready for them.

He prices everything higher than what he’s willing to take for it. Shoes are eight dollars, when he’s willing to take five. A ladder is twenty when, after he fell off it and nearly broke his neck, he’d give it away.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.