Auction Table of a Life
Musing about my things
I wrote into a prompt a few years back.
“What would be on the auction table at your estate sale? I looked around, and wrote…
Pantoum #140
Auction table of someone's life
Walrus skull—loose molars, one tusk askew
A tiny basket of wicker bugs from Chiang Mai
Through the Looking Glass, first edition
Walrus skull—loose molars, one tusk askew
A bowl of river stones, a coyote’s bleached spine
Through the Looking Glass, first edition
Beside it, a tattered Alice in Wonderland, loved to ruin
A bowl of river stones, a coyote’s bleached spine
Vertebrae holding hands, bone to bone
A tattered Alice in Wonderland, loved to ruin
Pieces of a teapot hurled in an angry kitchen
Vertebrae holding hands, bone to bone
A tangled marionette, its sombrero mouse-nibbled
Pieces of a teapot hurled in an angry kitchen
Why didn’t they throw these out?
A tangled marionette, its sombrero mouse-nibbled
Unravelled and frayed in a tantrum
Why didn’t they throw these out?
She needed them before she had a voice
Unravelled and frayed in a tantrum
Reminders of her surreality
She needed them before she had a voice
Now they sit in silence, unlabeled
Reminders of her surreality
Keeping the story alive when she felt gone
Now they sit in silence, unlabeled
Going once, going twice—not forgotten
Keeping the story alive when she felt gone
Saying goodbye to the weight that silenced her
Going once, going twice—not forgotten
She found her voice in the telling
Saying goodbye to the weight that silenced her
A tiny basket of wicker bugs from Chiang Mai
She found her voice in the telling
Auction table of someone's life
Here is my journal writing from 2023
I see folding tables under trees—unfolding and presenting my life at an auction. Without the history, there are only question marks. No story.
Ironically several years ago, I took my belongings and wrote a different narrative as a fake journal—pretending I was someone else downsizing from a house to a condo. A no less painful life, but told through fiction. The same things, seen through different eyes. Now I put them on an auction table without narrative.
There is a one-and-a-half-tusked walrus skull to greet the passerby. Beside it, Inuit carvings of fishermen and a seal. Their ocean is a mahogany board. I remember my mother dusting the bookcase, shoving the wooden platform to the left to clean around it—not noticing that the edge caught her skin. Instantly, a vertical blood blister bloomed down her forearm. She shrieked. Then shoved the soapstone scene to the right and did the exact same thing to the other arm. She was always doing impossible things to herself.
The tables continue: handmade textured pots by my mother, now holding dead plants. A mahogany box with a black scratches, carrying her silver case—never used in my house. Cake pans and bread pans that have forgotten what it feels like to hold rising dough under the oven light. A favourite asparagus microwave dish with a hole in the handle. A six-cup Pyrex measure that still smells faintly of candied pecans.
There is so much of my mother in my world, still. So much more of her than my father. His heirlooms would fit on one table: his Shriner’s fez bedazzled with Khartum Komedians in rhinestones, the Reineke Fuchs book by Goethe—rebound after a fire at sea, but its pages still watermarked. A carved owl from cedar. A brass candle-holding man holding twin lanterns, stepping into the dark unknown.
I realize I’ve inherited much from grandparents I never really knew. Their 3D travel slides and viewer bring their gardens to life in stop-motion—surreal and flickering.
There are three, maybe four Scrabble sets, each with hand-sewn tile bags. An old anagram game. Wooden toys from Mexico. Marionettes. Chickens that peck. A folk-art bell ringer. An Amish woman who pulls a bell rope at Christmas—I’ve left her out all year, for so long the rope is now frayed.
Books on gardening, calligraphy, quilting—how-to’s I never opened. Forgotten towers of intention.
I have words now that I didn’t back when I held onto everything.
These days, I let the pen pull me. Let the words speak what I couldn’t.
Going. Going.
Never forgotten.
Invitation:
Choose five objects that might outlive you.
Lay them out—on a real or imagined table.
Then, write one sentence about each.
Or let one of them speak.
What would it say?
What story would your table tell—if you weren’t there to tell it?
See you soon for #141,
P.S. If you want to browse through some of my writings visit The Pantoumery. What’s a pantoum, you say? I’m writing one each day, for a year. Learn how HERE
Also, The Well platform (prompts, classes and meeting links) is now available as mobile app!
