two yard sales staggered a week apart
my neighbors mobile home couldn't have been much more than 300 square feet inside. all of her belongings were on display, her home gutted and bare. concrete floors, harsh shadows cast by the 7am sunlight.
a week ago i saw a cleanup crew tossing cardboard and broken appliances out of her window into a large trash bin below.
a week ago my home was gutted too.
i asked the man running the sale if he was moving in or out. i mentioned my yard sale just a week prior.
in her home there sat a box of tin ornaments. a handful of magnets, two of which i picked for myself. she collected indigenous figurines and framed beadwork. on the table near the back of the screened in patio there lay stack of old VHS tapes, a small collection of jazz CDs, and a postcard from the college i would never attend.
i went home with one of those jazz CDs, some magnets, and a framed picture of my neighbor i only ever saw from a distance. for the first time i learned the details of her face.
she died of cancer two months prior, February 10th.
i held that $1 picture of her and insert disc one of "the Jazz Scene" into my CD slot. i am her. i am living in Florida decades ago, riding my bike along the beach and listening to the chamber orchestra. in the picture, she leans against iron railing near the seawall. I've been there, it's in my hometown 45 minutes south of here. i know the rush of those waves.
it feels sacrelige. intruding apon a deceased woman's home. picking through her fresh remains. conjuring an image of who she must've been. insinuating that i could learn anything about her character based on an assortment of her possessions. i feel ashamed and disgusted at myself. and i wonder what will become of me when i pass. what will people gather from the things i leave behind? what do my possessions speak of me? what remains do we leave unto the earth if not the possessions we held so tightly onto before death?
our bodies will decompose and our stories fade with time but my graverobbed sony alarm clock will probably outlive us all.