Heirlooms.

Estate sales evoke in me a strange alloy — the thrill of hunting through odd junk, mixed with what I can only call melancholy as I examine the castaways of a life, me the voyeur, they the divested dead. 

I can't help myself, I've haunted thrift shops and swap meets for centuries, I'll die and ghost around them I'm sure, ringing porcelain bells. Tiny House is flush with curious old effects, plates with hairline fractures & black fork-marks, scruffy furniture my Dad painted models on when he was 9, weird ceramic cat statuary, probably too much of it, but propriety is overrated. 

In a way, I'm a conservationist. I'm a collector, not so much of goods but of mythologies, stories for all the unstoried things. Like a cake stand, and a woman on her wedding day in 1892, it was November, a Wednesday, she wore a necklace of jet, she married a banker even though she wasn't in love, she wanted to visit Morocco instead, they served lavender tea and an allspice cake decorated with turtledoves on that cake stand, pressed by Adams & Co. out of Pittsburgh, stamped with every nuptial superstition: horseshoes, anchors, prayer mats, wheat. 

A cake stand, which I bought for $5 from a woman named Rae, whose mother's estate had been carefully arrayed on rows of tables in an old boxing gym, and who had only seen this cake stand once before, when her mother's mother died and left it behind. 

Do you bake? she asked me. 

I said I did. 

My mother was a baker, too. Her eyes glazed a little as she folded the bill into her pocket and turned to sell something else.