Dead Letter Department #71

weather report

My friend & I used to joke about cart rage at Trader Joe’s—similar to road rage, an overwhelming urge to do violence with your grocery cart when you have been pushed too far by the shenanigans of the shoppers around you. I used to think I was among the few afflicted with this particular disease, but I’m starting to think it’s incredibly common, based on the way I had to duck & dive at the store on Saturday, and the increasingly strange interactions I’ve been having. A woman actually shouted at me near the egg display for (supposedly) rolling my eyes at her, and all I can say if someone widens their eyes in surprise after you nearly hit them with your cart, and you decide to take that personally & get loud about it, your desire to stir up shit at the grocery store surpasses my understanding.

The (partial) solution to this is to simply not get a cart—I use the little hand basket instead, because it provides me with more maneuverability, and what with groceries being so expensive these days, my budget is far more basket than cart sized anyway. That way if somebody starts yelling at me about what the visible third of my face is doing above my mask while I try to find the right kind of jalapeño dip, or the pile up at the tomatoes is bringing me perilously close to rage myself, I can simply pivot away & come back when things have cleared up.

Sometimes after grocery shopping, my ability to do anything involving large groups of people or retail establishments has been sapped for a couple of days, that particular internal reservoir of patience presumably busily refilling, but this Saturday I was possessed with an urge to go to estate sales. It was the last week of summer, astrologically speaking, so there were a ton, and I paged through the online ads, peering at the pictures, and made a little list to present to my mom, who often likes to go to these things with me.

We ended up, after a long drive out into the county for the only weed store that had the tincture she wanted, all the way up at the lake, in front of a huge, immaculately landscaped, somewhat hideous house, where I was informed, as soon as we stepped inside, that we weren’t allowed to wear shoes. There was a big box of blue plastic booties next to the door, so I managed to wrestle a set onto my mom’s shoes, since she could not bend to do it, and left my own sneakers at the door. It felt very odd to be sock-footed in a stranger’s house, padding around on their obscenely expensive antique rugs & plush white carpeting. I was obscurely convinced that my shoes would not be there when I got back, although I can think of no reason in the world why someone with an antique collection like that would have any need for my battered pair of New Balance sneakers.

I always piece together bits of the lives that were lived in the house at estate sales: the hobbies, the education, the little paraphernalia that tells their story. In this case I think the husband had been gone for some time, and the wife had dived even deeper into her antique collecting: there were tables & tables of complete collections of glassware & crystal & pottery that I didn’t recognize but would no doubt thrill the collectors who were busily donning their little blue booties outside. One of the bedrooms had nearly every surface covered in icons & crucifixes, the second house I’ve been to this summer with a room like that. I keep thinking I’ll see a religious icon sometime & it’ll spark some need in me, but so far I’ve been able to pass them all up—perhaps I’m waiting for the right saint.

My real find was something that has actually been on my house wish list for years: a green banker’s desk lamp that I snatched up out of a pile of wallets and antique stuffed animals & plugged giddily into a nearby wall—still working, by God, & now it’s sitting right here on my desk. The little pull chain has a rusty patina in the two places where your hand automatically goes to turn it on, and I expect to spend many early writing mornings by its light now that the days are shrinking away so rapidly.

The next sale was down in my neighborhood, but on a street I had never had reason to drive down, a dead end up by the highway, somehow rural-feeling even though it’s tucked away behind some office buildings. A beloved local gardener had been in a bad accident a while back, and her friends were running the estate sale as a benefit for her new assisted living facility. The house was warm and slightly shabby in that way things are when you can’t quite keep up with everything the house needs, but it was clearly very much beloved. The gardener’s friends were shopping the sale, talking about how they’d seen the wind chimes every time they came over for dinner, and now they would hang them in their own garden.

I was saved from hauling a two hundred pound pot of Japanese maple up the dirt road only because I just planted a baby tree a couple weeks ago & I should really see how it does in the garden before putting more money into ill advised tree gambling, although if you’ve got a good idea of what fig I should plant for this climate, I am taking suggestions. I long for a fig tree. I didn’t buy anything at the house, but it was nice to see all the gardener’s friends, mostly vigorously outdoorsy lesbians, buying up things to make sure she had a good sale, and imagining them carrying her legacy of work onward in their own hands.

one good thing

I spotted what looked like it was going to be a particularly gorgeous sunset out my kitchen window on Saturday night, so I hurried down to the shore to watch it, and found a bunch of other people with the same idea, including a few gallant wind surfers, one who seemed to be rather new at the sport, spending rather more time falling off his board than on it. The little park I was at is getting steadily refurbished by the city, going from a ramshackle affair of driftwood and cement blocks to a rehabilitated estuary—and that long dock you see in the distance is going to be a boardwalk, one of these days. There was a great grey bank of smoke hanging off to the south, but we had billows of pink and orange as the sun went down, and it was good to sit there with all the other sky watchers, admiring the clouds.

Thank you for reading. If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may you remain unmenaced by other people’s shopping carts.