The Power of the Hoard
On parting with Things
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, and I want to thank everyone who has been patient and stuck with me. Starting in December, I began the process of helping my mother move out of the family home in Wisconsin and into an apartment in an assisted living facility. After that, the house needed to be emptied and so I hired someone to organize an estate sale. I also needed to spend time at the house going through things and deciding what I might want to keep, what I thought should be sold, what could just be thrown away.
My family has lived in and around Fountain City, Wisconsin since about 1850. This past month, the last of us departed that town, probably for good, though my mother isn’t so far away having moved across the Mississippi into Minnesota. The house my parents built and where I grew up will now be sold. Last weekend, there was a estate sale to get rid of the contents of the house, and it was massive. People came from half a dozen states to attend, some sleeping in their cars or camping out in the yard the night before it began. The whole house had items laid out in vast arrays, everything tagged with a price.
I made the mistake of looking at the estate sale website. On it, the entire contents of the house, garages, stable and barn was presented for sale. Toys from my childhood, my confirmation suit, books I read as a child, dishes, linens, furniture, the bed I slept in when I visited, kitchen utensils, tools, guns, boats, saddles, Christmas tree ornaments, and on and on—all of it had been given a price. The scale of it all was staggering, and I was simultaneously relieved that it was going to be taken away by someone—anyone—and horrified by what felt like a violation of privacy. Every object was familiar, some of them I had known and handled and used for my entire life. Some of the objects had resonance, the residue of meaning ascribed to them by generations of members of my family. Some of it was junk. All of it was known to me in some way, and because of this, it exerted a kind of magnetic pull. It’s not as though I actually wanted to keep these things—I don’t. I had already gone through the house and chosen the things I wanted and taken them to my home in Catskill. I also knew that I would not be present at the sale itself as I didn’t want to see what happened when the doors open and the house was flooded with people buying up objects from my past.
What I did take was resonant, largely impractical, impossible—for now—to part with. I took what is essentially the family archive: photographs, deeds, diaries, letters, correspondence that is both banal and touching. One day I imagine I will sort through it all, maybe even make something of it by writing about it. Maybe it will stay where it is, boxed and disorganized and unseen.
I will leave you with a photograph of three relatives—my great-great-great grandparents who had emigrated from Bohemia, now the Czech Republic. Their last name was Ctiboř. I especially love the way the father is touching the little boy’s hand resting on his knee.
