Excerpt

January started with a trip to Peggy’s. In fact, we brought in the New Year there.

My brother, my boyfriend, and I drove down to Singer Island, Florida to meet my parents at Peggy’s house. The mission was to clean out the house and get it put on the market.

Peggy lived to be 91 years old. She had no kids and her husband passed away 20 years  ago. Peggy was my dad’s mother’s sister. My great aunt. I hadn't seen Peggy since I was still in single digits. She and Bob, her husband, gave me a baby grand piano when I was born. It still sits in my mother’s den falling out of tune and collecting dust.

Peggy passed away the previous October. A couple days before Halloween. My mother always says the veil is thin that time of year. 

We had a 20 foot dumpster parked in the driveway. We had it emptied twice in the week I was there. Almost all the furniture was given to local families that couldn't afford it. Mostly immigrants.  

I didn't know Peggy but I came to see that she never threw anything away. She seemed to be a very sentimental woman who liked to show off nice things she had collected from around the world. 

My boyfriend fell in love with a bright colored floral dish towel and some photos of her at the beach when she was young. 

She looked happy. 

That tropical dish towel now lives in our kitchen, hanging from the oven door handle. The photos have become bookmarks. 

Peggy’s house had green and orange shag carpet with a pool in the backyard. It smelled old. It was dark. It was also filled with musical instruments. Her and Bob were musicians and professors. When you are cleaning out a decent sized house that is full of a lifetime of stuff you might expect the females to have a hard time quickly going through things, assessing value, and mostly tossing stuff out. At least I was expecting my mother to be like that. 

But my brother! Every drawer, every box, every closet was like a new treasure chest.

A week of this gets old. Throw it away. What would you ever do with that? No one needs it. It isn't worth keeping… so on and so on. I  saw a new side of my brother.  

The collector - the hoarder. 

By the time we got back to Tennessee, my brother seemed to be expressing something similar to buyer’s remorse in regards to all the things he brought back. 

We - my mom and my dad, my brother, my boyfriend and I - spent over a week throwing out and giving away just about everything this woman, Peggy, had collected. We didn't have an emotional connection to her really. Nor to her belongings. We, in a strange way, got  to know her solely through this experience.