Rummage

Our church ladies are having a rummage sale tomorrow, and the gym is crammed with stuff, an unbelievable amount of clothes, lamps, geegaws, furniture. They never sell it all, and on Monday the Anti-Poverty people will come take the remains to their on-going rummage sale. I loathe rummage sales, and Bill loves them. I loathe holding yard sales and attending them; Bill loves having them and attending them. The university women’s club has a yearly book sale with thousands of books. The sheer number of books discourages me. The ladies have made some attempt to sort them, but with so many people crowding you, looking for any particular book is impossible. And yet in our basement, I have a room crowded with “archives”, my fancy name for the photographs, letters, clippings, kids’ report cards. Whenever I try to file the papers or otherwise make sense of them, I think I should throw some of it away. But I am unable to make judgments about should go and what should remain. When we were cleaning out our aunt’s apartment, we were faced with many photos, some of them of very interesting looking people obviously from a foreign clime, and knew there was no hope of figuring out who these people were, where they were from, how we were related. We reluctantly threw many of them out, but even now I wish we had kept the four or five photos of the young girls in embroidered pinafores picking grapes.