Sold!

Grandma Dailey (my dad’s mother) lived in the country near DeQueen Arkansas for about 37 years. For the last 30 years she lived there alone after the death of her husband, Aubrey. She was an antiques dealer, quilt maker and made the best corn bread. She’s 93 now and her health has gotten to the point where she can’t live alone anymore and has moved in with one of her daughters in Texas. On Saturday she held an auction at her house to sell her furniture and other belongings to get the house ready for it to sell.

As an antiques dealer, she amassed quite a collection of glassware. It was apparently her specialty. Much of the stuff had been around as long as I can remember, about 35 years, but a lot of it I had never seen before. She was still wheeling and dealing until fairly recently, so I imagine she acquired some of the items not long ago. The auction company moved everything but the furniture outside under two big tents and about 50 folks showed up to sweat and bid.

She watched much of the proceedings through a window in the living room sheltered from the south Arkansas heat. As you can imagine, seeing her things going home with strangers was an emotional ordeal for her. It was emotional for her children, also. And me. I spent large chunks of time as kid at her place. When I got older, I spent entire summers living with her and working the worst jobs imaginable in and around DeQueen.

The auction kicked off at 10 a.m. and at noon the auctioneer broke from the outside items and brought everyone inside to bid on the furniture.

Then it was back outside until about 3 p.m. when everything wrapped up.

One good thing about the auction was that I got to visit with people I don’t see very often. My Dad and my uncles Stan and Dale traded stories about how the old yellow canoe got so beat up. (If you look closely, you can see light coming through the bottom the of the boat in the picture.) It was an “anniversary present” from my Dad to himself 39 years ago. For the last 25 or so years it has rested in an overgrown fence row at Grandma’s. She once allowed as how she could fill it with dirt for a planter and put it in front of the house. Dad poo-pooed that suggestion. He loaded it up and took it to Kansas. He’s got several suitable fence rows where it will feel right at home.

This crew, various aunts and uncles and my dad, watched from the shade as I was roped into helping carry the heaviest piece of furniture from the house and load it into some guy’s truck.

The Old House, as it is known, served as Grandma’s antique shop for 20 years or so. It sits on the highway a couple hundred yards from the new house. I don’t know how old it is, probably over 100. It had a hand-dug well on the side that I found fascinating. A major safety hazard, it was filled in awhile back. (I think one of the neighbor’s dogs fell in it.) Grandma and Grandpa lived in the house for a few months while their house was being built. As a kid I spent many sweltering summer afternoons inside the unairconditioned confines as Grandma waited for customers to pull off U.S. 71 and browse. It is the mother lode of wasp nests. I knocked a lot of them down from the front porch ceiling using a cane pole or other similar device. The yard out front provided ample room to flee from the angry little monsters.

The old place has been patched and repaired innumerable times. I remember these steps being added probably 25 years ago. They’re still fairly sturdy.

After the hubbub died down in the afternoon, Dad and I slipped away to do a little fishing. We hit Cedar Bluff, a local swimming hole on the Robinson Fork River not far from Grandma’s house. It’s not the best fishing spot, but you can’t get to the good spots anymore because Weyerhauser, the timber company that owns most of the land in the area, decided a few years ago to restrict access on its private holdings. The nerve.