Tired of Turning in Your Grave Yet, Uncle O???
It must have been the sunshine and the countrified smell of silage and alfalfa. Whatever it was, Sunday evening as Tim and I, his brother Jim and parents were meeting at the farm and doing some inspection of the auctioneers' efforts (in preparation for this Saturday's estate sale), I was inspired to volunteer for more heavy lifting. After all, I am conveniently positioned halfway between home and the Frankenmuth area when I'm at work. And the days and hours before the sale are running out. Tim has been running himself ragged spending every spare day or partial day driving the hour one way trip to help sort, haul, supervise, arrange roll-off dumpsters and storage pods, clean, and get things in order. The work I've put in is only a tiny fraction of what he's done.
The particular target this time was an enormous pile of hoes, shovels, tools and scrap metal leaning haphazardly in a corner in mom and dad Reinert's shed. How did all this (among countless other piles of stuff) come to be in their shed, five miles away from where the estate sale is to be held? Well, that goes back over the seven year history of this epic project. It's said older people can be prone to paranoia in later years, and the presence of pathological forgetfulness probably only enhances it. Sherlock Holmes had his Moriarity, and dad has his nemesis in the form of the neighbor adjoining the back boundary of Uncle O's farm. Let's call him Mr. Stream.
Mr. Stream has done an incredible amount of work to help us over the last 7 years. He's mowed and trimmed and kept the property on which the farmhouse, pole barn and outbuildings sit from utterly descending into even more ruin. He's kept an eye on things. He's loaning several large flatbed trailers for the auctioneer and his people to spread out and display items for the sale. And in return, he's been given or sold various items, furniture in particular. Which, after all is said and done, is probably a fair deal.
Yet dad seems to think this guy's been robbing us blind the whole time. Dad told me every time he was out at the farm, he saw Mr. Stream making off with a truckload of stuff. So in order to properly safeguard all these valuables, dad hauled loads of stuff home. Including the filthy pile of rusted tools which faced me at 7am on Tuesday morning after getting off work. I just nodded to this latest retelling of an old tale, and proceeded to start loading it all, plus stacks of plastic 5-gallon pails and other miscellany that we had encouraged mom and dad to add to the sale (translation: for the love of God, PLEASE use this opportunity to clear out your own cluttered rooms and jam-packed closets and basement. While there's still time.).
After an hour, we had the back of my truck completely filled, as well as the back of their mini-van. Standout items: The hatchet-shaped cleaver with a head as big as my lap-top. 'Probably for butchering,' mom said. Pick-axes that looked like props from a wild west gold mine movie. The huge grim reaper-esque scythe. 'I remember my father using that to clear the ditch banks', said mom. I was mainly concentrating on keeping that and the wicked-looking rusty saws out of dad's hands. A 10-foot length of steel with a pointy end got loaded into my truck last. 'We'll take that in the van,' dad said. 'No, you will not,' said I, jamming it pointy end first diagonally in the bed of my truck so there was no way it would slide or turn into a deadly projectile once we hit the road.
For safety's sake, I led the way down back roads rather than drive through downtown Frankenmuth. And at one time, the idea of parading through the center of that tidy, flower-bedecked town with an open truckload of crap would have amused the hell out of my inner adolescent boy. Now? Not so much.
I was both impressed and concerned with which energy mom and dad loaded and unloaded all this stuff. I'm not sure if they paid for it later with body aches and tiredness, but they threw themselves into it. I'm wondering if mom's sleep will improve once this sale is over, and sealed bid auction for the farmland and house are done. What will fill the vacuum after cleaning up after Uncle O is all over? For them and us? I know our home and yard have been a little neglected all summer. We've got yardwork and projects on our own property to fill our time.
One such project will be refinishing the dining room table and chairs we are acquiring from Uncle O's estate. It's nothing fancy, but according to Mom R, it was brand new when her parents got married in 1917. The varnish has crinkled on the chairs, and the tabletop is marred by imprints of the junk piled on top of it for decades. In 2006, when the clean-up project began, this table couldn't even be seen because it was literally buried. Mom says she sat down to dinner at this table less than ten times in her life when she was living in that house. This was the formal dining room table. She remembers it being covered with a lace tablecloth and a big centerpiece. I'm really trying to stop and pay attention when she shares memories of items. She's been doing a lot of that lately.
There will probably not be a lace tablecloth in its future, but it's going to replace the current table in the Moosewood Lodge. That ugly 50's era piece inherited from Grandma Zucker is going to trade places with it, and be sold in the auction. Sorry Grandma, but it's going bye-bye. We've used it well all these years.
The auctioneer and some of his people showed up to continue the work of sorting and moving items, and I got to meet them. The same auctioneer handled Grandpa Zucker's house for mom three years ago, and in all that time I never met the guy until now. A woman named Deb kindly assured us 'it would all be over in a few days' when Mom R and I remarked what a long, filthy journey from hell this had all been. It must be that these people regularly deal with distraught and frustrated family members in their professions.
As I was getting ready to leave, dining room chairs now loaded in the back of my truck, I watched a couple guys push open the sliding back doors of the pole barn. I'd never seen those doors open before, and they parted like curtains on a stage. Looking through the front door, the dark interior framed a scene right out of a Country Living magazine: neighbor Jake was cutting the alfalfa field in his big John Deere, green and beige bands arrowing straight back to the woods. It really made me wish I could sit and watch and smell a while, and not need to put an hour's worth of windshield time behind me so I could hurry up and get to bed. So I can function in my soul-destroying job.
Brother-in-law Jim asked me yet again Sunday evening if I still wanted to buy the place. Absolutely. Do I have the means to do so? Absolutely not. Because it would mean buying both our retirements from our old lives, and the resources to fund the new lives needed to fix up and manage this money pit. And that's a whole hell of a lot of money.
So I'm mostly over the dream. Tim is SO ready for the property and contents to be sold and gone. In the meantime, there are smaller, more manageable dreams. In less than two weeks we leave for our Alaska vacation/cruise. After a year and a half of planning, it's practically here. We can clean up and refinish the table. I can still bake stuff in my own familiar home kitchen. I can learn to take days off work and budget my time and energy for the farmers' market. What more excuse do I need to whittle down a major pile of PTO?
And Mom R says maybe she'll get to eat at that table once more. 'If I'm still alive,' she laughs. I'd like to make that happen.
The particular target this time was an enormous pile of hoes, shovels, tools and scrap metal leaning haphazardly in a corner in mom and dad Reinert's shed. How did all this (among countless other piles of stuff) come to be in their shed, five miles away from where the estate sale is to be held? Well, that goes back over the seven year history of this epic project. It's said older people can be prone to paranoia in later years, and the presence of pathological forgetfulness probably only enhances it. Sherlock Holmes had his Moriarity, and dad has his nemesis in the form of the neighbor adjoining the back boundary of Uncle O's farm. Let's call him Mr. Stream.
Mr. Stream has done an incredible amount of work to help us over the last 7 years. He's mowed and trimmed and kept the property on which the farmhouse, pole barn and outbuildings sit from utterly descending into even more ruin. He's kept an eye on things. He's loaning several large flatbed trailers for the auctioneer and his people to spread out and display items for the sale. And in return, he's been given or sold various items, furniture in particular. Which, after all is said and done, is probably a fair deal.
Yet dad seems to think this guy's been robbing us blind the whole time. Dad told me every time he was out at the farm, he saw Mr. Stream making off with a truckload of stuff. So in order to properly safeguard all these valuables, dad hauled loads of stuff home. Including the filthy pile of rusted tools which faced me at 7am on Tuesday morning after getting off work. I just nodded to this latest retelling of an old tale, and proceeded to start loading it all, plus stacks of plastic 5-gallon pails and other miscellany that we had encouraged mom and dad to add to the sale (translation: for the love of God, PLEASE use this opportunity to clear out your own cluttered rooms and jam-packed closets and basement. While there's still time.).
After an hour, we had the back of my truck completely filled, as well as the back of their mini-van. Standout items: The hatchet-shaped cleaver with a head as big as my lap-top. 'Probably for butchering,' mom said. Pick-axes that looked like props from a wild west gold mine movie. The huge grim reaper-esque scythe. 'I remember my father using that to clear the ditch banks', said mom. I was mainly concentrating on keeping that and the wicked-looking rusty saws out of dad's hands. A 10-foot length of steel with a pointy end got loaded into my truck last. 'We'll take that in the van,' dad said. 'No, you will not,' said I, jamming it pointy end first diagonally in the bed of my truck so there was no way it would slide or turn into a deadly projectile once we hit the road.
For safety's sake, I led the way down back roads rather than drive through downtown Frankenmuth. And at one time, the idea of parading through the center of that tidy, flower-bedecked town with an open truckload of crap would have amused the hell out of my inner adolescent boy. Now? Not so much.
I was both impressed and concerned with which energy mom and dad loaded and unloaded all this stuff. I'm not sure if they paid for it later with body aches and tiredness, but they threw themselves into it. I'm wondering if mom's sleep will improve once this sale is over, and sealed bid auction for the farmland and house are done. What will fill the vacuum after cleaning up after Uncle O is all over? For them and us? I know our home and yard have been a little neglected all summer. We've got yardwork and projects on our own property to fill our time.
One such project will be refinishing the dining room table and chairs we are acquiring from Uncle O's estate. It's nothing fancy, but according to Mom R, it was brand new when her parents got married in 1917. The varnish has crinkled on the chairs, and the tabletop is marred by imprints of the junk piled on top of it for decades. In 2006, when the clean-up project began, this table couldn't even be seen because it was literally buried. Mom says she sat down to dinner at this table less than ten times in her life when she was living in that house. This was the formal dining room table. She remembers it being covered with a lace tablecloth and a big centerpiece. I'm really trying to stop and pay attention when she shares memories of items. She's been doing a lot of that lately.
There will probably not be a lace tablecloth in its future, but it's going to replace the current table in the Moosewood Lodge. That ugly 50's era piece inherited from Grandma Zucker is going to trade places with it, and be sold in the auction. Sorry Grandma, but it's going bye-bye. We've used it well all these years.
The auctioneer and some of his people showed up to continue the work of sorting and moving items, and I got to meet them. The same auctioneer handled Grandpa Zucker's house for mom three years ago, and in all that time I never met the guy until now. A woman named Deb kindly assured us 'it would all be over in a few days' when Mom R and I remarked what a long, filthy journey from hell this had all been. It must be that these people regularly deal with distraught and frustrated family members in their professions.
As I was getting ready to leave, dining room chairs now loaded in the back of my truck, I watched a couple guys push open the sliding back doors of the pole barn. I'd never seen those doors open before, and they parted like curtains on a stage. Looking through the front door, the dark interior framed a scene right out of a Country Living magazine: neighbor Jake was cutting the alfalfa field in his big John Deere, green and beige bands arrowing straight back to the woods. It really made me wish I could sit and watch and smell a while, and not need to put an hour's worth of windshield time behind me so I could hurry up and get to bed. So I can function in my soul-destroying job.
Brother-in-law Jim asked me yet again Sunday evening if I still wanted to buy the place. Absolutely. Do I have the means to do so? Absolutely not. Because it would mean buying both our retirements from our old lives, and the resources to fund the new lives needed to fix up and manage this money pit. And that's a whole hell of a lot of money.
So I'm mostly over the dream. Tim is SO ready for the property and contents to be sold and gone. In the meantime, there are smaller, more manageable dreams. In less than two weeks we leave for our Alaska vacation/cruise. After a year and a half of planning, it's practically here. We can clean up and refinish the table. I can still bake stuff in my own familiar home kitchen. I can learn to take days off work and budget my time and energy for the farmers' market. What more excuse do I need to whittle down a major pile of PTO?
And Mom R says maybe she'll get to eat at that table once more. 'If I'm still alive,' she laughs. I'd like to make that happen.