We recently held a garage sale to shed ourselves of accumulated “stuff” because we are moving to a smaller home. As strangers bought and carried items out the door, it made me think about what they had meant at one time.
Selling a white leather show halter took me to the time as a young 4H-er when I showed a Holstein heifer at the Achievement Days event in Lisbon. The dairy judge paraded our class in a circle around him and placed my heifer in the top blue ribbon position. She had fought the plain tie-up halter a bit, which caused the judge to remark that I should use a show halter with a draw chain. Fourteen-years old, I considered that an order to be obeyed. Merlyn Skramstad had a beautiful white one hanging in his leather store for which I paid about three dollars. Over sixty years had passed, but I’d always kept it. Not seeing it sell this day, I asked my wife who bought it, and she said someone wanted it to give as a joke to a neighbor for the plastic cow standing in his backyard.
Memories of the smack and sting of a baseball hitting my glove at the time I answered to “Lefty” walked out the door in the hands of another stranger. The dry leather still retained a memory, too, the shape my sweaty hand had formed in them so many years ago. Would they resist their new owner’s attempts at reshaping?
Dad had given me a kerosene lantern when he downsized saying his dad gifted it to them at the time of their marriage in 1941. It found use when it lit the way to the barn at calving and lambing time. And before electricity lit the house, my folks used it along with a gas lantern to light the living room. The owner of an antique store in St. Paul bought it.
Two pieces of rusty barbed wire caught a buyer’s attention. He thought I’d marked it too cheap, but we had to dispose of everything. Dozens of barbed wire styles have been manufactured through the years; these were each a flat ribbon style. Dad remembered them from his youth, saying they were impractical because they stretched and contracted too easily with temperature changes. Historically, wire figured prominently in the development of the frontier and resulted in redefining the landscape, both for the good and the bad.
I enjoy watching a good rodeo, especially the bull riding events. A few years back, a local Mandan bull, Little Yellow Jacket, achieved fame as a consistent winner. I found a model of him on the Breyer PBR Collectibull series. Not being content with ordering just one, I bought some other bull models also. Except for him, I placed them on the sale table and an excited little boy talked his mother into buying the four of them at $7.50 each. I remarked to her that I’d like to buy a model of the new local winning bull, Pearl Harbor, a recent contender for the top spot. She informed me that he had just died with a broken neck. I imagine the SPCA will investigate that one.
Some years back, we visited a woodcarver named John Kittelson in Wyoming whose work I’d admired. His carved scenes horses, cow, and wagons brought thousands of dollars, and I wanted to carve like him. Alas, that never happened. As a souvenir of our visit, I ran into a Wyoming Wildlife magazine that featured an example of his work on the cover. It fit nicely into a frame that I hung in my shop. It sold quickly.
Of course, not everything sold. Without realizing it, we’d blundered into perfect dates for our sale because the leftovers fit nicely into a few boxes and were hauled to a large church rummage sale scheduled a few days later. Even more good fortune came our way with the annual city-wide cleanup following our sale where all of the junk was hauled away.
The old George Carlin comedy routine about “stuff” and the efforts we put into owning it and storing it comes to mind. His words ring true because as much as ours seemed valuable before the sale, we’ve already started forgetting about it.
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It will be good to settle into our new home so a quiet routine can be established again. The pioneer and frontier stories of Ransom County have interested me for some time and I’ve set about finding them. A worthy book could result and I hope to write it.
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