The Estate Sale Diaries Early Summer 2011

As neighborhoods grow old, so do their people. This is the only way I can explain the many estate sales this past June in the Nashville suburb of West Meade.

West Meade is a good neighborhood, but a poor cousin to Belle Meade, the best neighborhood. Highway 70 ,also known as Harding Road , divides them, as does a single lane railroad track. Both share Richland Creek, a nasty little watercourse capable of awful things, as we all discovered during last year's flood.

West Meade is modest, tree and church lined, and so identical are the homes and steeples that one easily gets lost and turned around among the great magnolias and the pink crepe myrtles. On a recent Saturday I was lost there for 20 minutes. I felt like Charlie in the old 60s song- lost forever on the MTA beneath the streets of Boston. The man who never returned.

But I did return, having found the day's second estate sale on a street not far from Charlotte, a street and a neighborhood which are a very different story-

How easy it is to label people, to think we can know much about them from the books they leave or the pans they cooked in or the entire rooms devoted to Christmas tableware, decorations, music, ornaments. I look instead at the remnants of their hobbies, the mementos of other places they have lived or travelled to.

By coincidence both these estates were of people of conspicuous religion. Perhaps the first house, on the nicer edge, belonged to a minister and his wife. An open minded minister with a library spanning the Catholic catechism to the Book of Mormon. Mrs. Minister collected hand painted pottery and vases. I believe the couple had once lived in Tampa. There was a framed map of Tampa Bay and Ybor Ciy. I bought their copy of The Gasparilla Cookbook (collected by the Junior League of Tampa.) I did not buy the map. I wish I had. I also brought home one of her tall painted vases, and a small, flat, well seasoned cast iron pan I will use as a comal.

The second sale , inside a small and undistiguished brick house with a minimalist yard, was more surprising. Books by Anita Bryant, books that boasted good, clean Christian jokes. Religiosity everywhere. Until one looked deeper. I found and bought the Gene Stratton Porter books here. An obvious remnant of a childhood. One book was 90 years old. The other was published in 1904. And in the basement I found the remains of a seeker. A vast rock collection, unlikely to have value to anyone but a collector. Boxes, and jar after jar of shells. Hundreds of National Geographic magazines. Bits of Mexican Pottery. A field guide to cacti. Maps of Colorado. The sandstone in my photo with a pastel of a yucca plant and an adobe village in the distance.

I think I would have liked to meet the person who had these passions.



Not all the items in my photos came from these two sales. The Steubenville china tea set came from another West Meade sale. The Paragon china teacup and saucer was part of a set I bought yesterday in River Plantation.