Sold on Auctions

For a paltry amount of cash, I came home from an auction yesterday with two boxes of doilies, a box of aprons, a canner, a canister coffee pot, and a 1950s coffee carafe. I love a good treasure hunt. It's even better when the money involved registers in the "pittance" category as opposed to the "Geez, how am I going to make the car payment?"

You never know what you'll find because, of course, you can't tell from the sale bill. "Antique oak table" can translate visually into "table someone knocked together out of oak forty years ago and let sit around in the damp basement until we pulled it out for the auction and evicted the spider colony." You have to look underneath the tables, test the chairs for stability, dig through boxes, unfold the quilts, and sniff the linens. But therein lies the excitement.

I have come home with fuzzy black buttons I thought would make great applique spiders, table linens still in the dry cleaning bag with the bill attached, a cloth napkin from TWA, grape trivets made by crocheting purple variegated thread over bottle caps. Of course, I've also come home with a crocheted parrot pot holder, plastic doilies that had melted onto a vinyl tablecloth, and some really smelly old lace. Not only is it a treasure hunt -- it's a crap shoot.

Some -- I'm thinking of my oldest sister here -- might ask why I want all this "treasure". (Actually, Lynn would use a different word.) Lots of different reasons. Holding onto the crafts of the past is one. I can't make doilies or lace -- and will never try again after a rather horrific tatting incident -- so I can appreciate the work and patience that created them. I know how much time goes into handquilting, and gingham apron fabric is getting harder and harder to find.

I am also fascinated by the possibilities -- a retro party with nut cups served on luncheon plates, a backyard barbecue with long tables covered in all the white cloths I bought for $5, hanging my small quilts with the wooden pants hangers that came from the Madsen Bros. of Walnut and Minden.

Auctions, at the very least, are recycling occasions, and at the most are events of transition -- death or moves to assisted living, usually. This is someone's life splayed out on tables and lowboys for people to pick through, assess, and either dismiss or covet. It's Christmas, Mother's Day, years of collecting. These things that we auction-goers casually brush past meant something once; they possessed importance, conjured memory.

And so, having brought my trove home, I feel a responsibility to surround it with new memories, imbue it with new worth, integrate it into my history. In short, treasure it.