Missing: One Wrought Iron Skillet, One Teflon Skillet, The Past....

I met a woman at one of the garage sales where I was practicing ethnography during the writing of my dissertation. She must have been in her seventies, though she looked very healthy. She also looked a little lost. She walked up and down the row of long makeshift tables (invented by jigsawing plywood sheets balanced on sawhorses and cardtables and interspersed with borrowed picnic tables from all the neighbors) and straightened sweaters and toys, old books and...most frequently...

....a table covered with bolts of cloth. A few of them looked recent, but most looked decades old.

I smiled at her as I walked up the driveway. I couldn't tell from her meandering if she was a shopper or a host. The two women in their thirties sitting at the mouth of the garage door, a fishing tackle box propped up on the lawn chair next to them, were clearly hosts. I chatted them up a moment. Told them about the research that I was doing and admitted that yes, possibly, some day I would write a book about garage sales.

!

They found the idea *too* funny!

"Writing a book about all this junk!"

The other one nodded at the elder woman at the far end of the driveway:

"She doesn't think its junk...."

"I've been worried a couple times that she was going to jerk something out of somebody's hands before they bought it."

They both laughed. One explained.

"Her mother's movin' in here, we have to sell some of her stuff. You shoulda' seen all the stuff that was in that house." I nodded sympathetically. Most garage sales signified some kind of transition. Even if just a seasonal transition - a Spring Cleaning dimension - people have a fundamental need to CHANGE in PUBLIC space. Since most of these transition are essentially private transformations, what better time to throw open your garage door and let the worst of who you were tumble down the driveway in anticipation of the New You which you are about to become?

.

Much as I love garage sales and public transformations of private selves, I'm not really, ultimately a good garage saler. I can't participate well in both sides of the natural cycle: Buying to get deals / Selling to clean house.

I love to buy though!

So this weekend it turns out that we're coming to the end of the line with one of our good friends. Well, I call her a friend, but in reality, she's just a skillet with teflon coating. Maybe we acquired her as a wedding present, maybe during another move later. I'm not honestly sure. But as Lynn wrenched her wrist trying to scrape perfectly done pancakes from the bottom of the pan, I realized that it was time to let the thing go.



And I do understand that its absurd that I feel a sense of loss that we're losing a pan. (clearly Addison's less concerned. He has for now gained a new toy.)

.

I wandered down by the end of the long tables where the bolts of cloth lay in a neatly stacked and regularly straightened pattern. I look back at the 30 something women sitting at the top of the driveway enjoying today's excuse to sit and talk outdoors in the sunshine.

"I feel like they're ghosts." She says this to me matter of factly, as if we were friends, as if we had been having a conversation. We hadn't. And we weren't. But now we were.

"When I was a little girl," she continued, "I still remember this like it was yesterday. I went with my mother to the five and dime store and we picked out fabrics for a dress I was going to make. That was my first dress and she helped me with every stitch. I took it to the fair, but I don't remember if I won a ribbon..."

"I thought some of this material looked like it had been around for a while," I answered. I meant for that to be an affirmation. I like old things. But after I said it, it feels like the wrong thing to say. I smile, hoping that will help.

She fingers a neatly folded square of brown plaid.

"A little girl came by yesterday," She smiled back at me. "She was a girl scout and with her mother and she was going to make her first dress. She bought fabric and I could tell she was paying with her own money. I wanted to give it all to her." She ran her fingers across the folds of fabric, neatly piled. " I wanted to give it all to her. All the material. But I knew that her mother wanted her to understand what it was like to buy something. I almost felt like my mother was standing there with me at the five and dime. Or that maybe she was a ghost in the fabric.

.

Isn't that how it is with all of our things though? These objects that we use to make our lives more solid, more whole? We start out with them as tools to ends, but by the time we get to their ends, they're shot through with us.

This teflon-less skillet reminds me of all the bad cooking we did when we first lived together. Tuna Noodle Casserole, Tuna Helper, and the better cooking Spanish Rice, Fried Rice. Then later as we treated it like a wok -- mixing stir fries and tie combinations. I learned how to make a roux in that pan for crying out loud.

That pan become politicized when the doctor dianosed Lynn with anemia and her mother and aunts all sent an Iron Skillet sure that cooking IN iron would ultimately put a bit more iron in the bloodstream.



And as if the ways that a pan strung us from family to event to family and history through scrawled out recipes weren't enough -- there is the physical lived way that the warmth and fullness of the food from this pan has delighted us, satiated us, comforted us, calmed us.

...And there's this sneaking suspicion that we're actually saying goodbye to ghosts.