It has been more than ten days since my last post, and to the one or two persons who are following this blog I do apologize. We have been very busy, perhaps as busy as when we were working full-time jobs. Nearly every day we have been going to Hickory Street, moving furniture, carrying things up and down stairs, arranging belongings on display tables, and taking loads of trash to the landfill. One day last week we even loaded up a full-size refrigerator and delivered it to Martha's brother's house. As I was carrying our small lunch cooler out to the car yesterday, I felt a little like a construction worker must feel at the end of a long day carrying his lunch pail wearily to his truck. Just as I do when I work in our yard all day, or on a construction project at our house, it makes me appreciate the millions of men and women who earn a living doing such work eight hours every day.
Last Saturday we had the first of four estate sales, and it was by far the most successful. At 9:00 a.m., there were thirty or forty people in the driveway waiting for the garage doors to open. In no time, we were deluged with sales. One lady began to gather so many things that Martha devoted herself entirely to helping her stack it up on the front porch and totaling it all up. She and her husband, plus another couple who had come with them, loaded up two pickup trucks that still did not hold it all - they arranged to come back the next day for what they could not carry away.
When we all compared notes at the end of the day, we agreed that we had worked well together – Angie and Scott stationed in the garage where the main sales point was, and Martha and I working as “floaters” answering questions and taking cash for small items. Everyone was wearing a face mask and did not seem to mind at all.
The sale was not as well-attended on Sunday but still a success. "There will be plenty of tools next week," we kept telling people, because we had not yet had time to sort through the basement, which was absolutely filled with tools, equipment, and auto parts. There was a maze of drop cords and lights scattered across the area where Martha's Dad had tinkered on his Model T and Model A, as well as assorted other vehicles over the years. A narrow, dark corridor off to the side led to what looked like an absolute mess, but from which I had learned over the years he could unfailingly pull a basin wrench or some other odd tool that I asked to borrow.
Upstairs, the tables emptied quickly, and the woman who had arranged to come back and pick up the balance of her things agreed to buy most of the rest of the small items. The family room, by the end of the week, was completely empty, and we changed the advertisements in the paper from "household goods" to entirely tools.
We were glad that many of the grandchildren were interested in the more esoteric auto parts. The two grandsons had bought the Model A and Model T after Martha's Dad died four years ago, and so they knew what, for example, a coil tester for a Model T Ford looked like.
The tool sale took place this weekend, with light rain from the remnants of Hurricane Laura not deterring dozens of people, mostly men, waiting again for the garage door to open Saturday morning. Angie and Scott were in the garage where half of the tools were located and Martha and I were downstairs in the shadowy basement, and while some items quickly sold, I watched many men look with puzzlement at some unique tool, like the long spoon-shaped lever for removing the tire on a T Model.
One of my friends, who is an old car enthusiast and knew Martha's Dad well, stopped by today and began pulling small parts out of a cabinet; I had seen them and had no idea what they were. "See this?" he said. "A distributor for a T-Model. And look at this! A starter switch." He was pretty excited by it all. He told me that Martha's Dad had often come over to his house and talked cars while he was working on an unusual old car. "You know," he said, pointing to his head, "You can Google this or that, or look in a manual, but you can't replace what's up here!"
The sale this morning cleaned out most of the rest of the tools, and we agreed that we were at a point where we could donate the balance to the local thrift shop, Mountain Findings, together with some other household furniture that had not sold. We plan to list the property with a realtor this coming week, and are hopeful that it will sell quickly. The real estate market in Highlands is absolutely exploding. Everyone wants to escape the chaos wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic and come to this beautiful place, where the pandemic is pretty much under control for the moment. We have heard that during the past two weeks, 110 homes sold in Highlands, all of them above the asking price.
Toward the end of the day, Martha spotted something tucked away under the stairs in the basement: the original Highlands Variety Store sign that had once hung over the front door of that wonderful place on the Hill on Fourth Street where she and her sister and brother had grown up. One of the grandson's immediately said he would like to have it.
And so it goes, settling an estate like this, as we remember the wonderful father, the talented all-around mechanic and inveterate tinkerer, and the gentle and beautiful woman who married him. Day by day we have sorted through the things that they collected together over the years in this big house, the rooms now emptied of furniture and auto parts and tools, but still filled with wonderful memories.
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