One hour with an estate sale lady taught me more about what families keep than sixty years of keeping things myself.
I met her the month after my mother passed. My brother and I had thirty days to empty the house she’d lived in for forty years. My brother lived three states away, so most of the sorting was mine. I hired an estate sale company to sell what the family didn’t take.
The woman who ran it came over on a gray Thursday morning. She had a clipboard, a roll of blue painter’s tape, and the calmest voice I’d heard all month. (It had been a loud month.)
She walked through every room with me, one at a time.
I’ve thought about her words every week since. They changed how I look at my mother’s things, and they changed how I look at my own.
I wrote about those thirty days in Mom’s house before. But I never wrote about her.
So if you’re trying to decide what to keep from your parents’ house, or you’re just wondering what your own family will want someday, let me tell you what she said.