Last Friday, I drove my mom up to Aunt Theresa's tudor home in Westchester. There are about a hundred chores that need to happen before she can put the house on the market.

While we were waiting for the plumber to inspect the downstairs bathroom, we cleaned. We needed to attack the four bedrooms that hadn't been touched in about five years, when Aunt Theresa became too ill to walk upstairs. Aunt Theresa was never the best of housekeepers when she was healthy, but the house really crumbled during the last five  years before her death. 

We trudged upstairs to attack the mess. We pulled everything out of one room and made piles. The clothes for the Salvation Army went on the bed in one room, books went in the hallway, the bathroom became the zone for stuff that should go straight to the dumpster. 

The closets were stuffed to the brim with all sorts of random things. She had bolts and bolts of fabric and yarn and thread for sewing. One dresser was stuffed with little scraps of cloth leftover from past sewing projects. Some of the scraps were only one inch wide. What was she planning on doing with that? I made a five foot stack of fabric that had never been taken out of the packaging.

I found another 80 boxes of fabric in the attic. They had been moldering in the attic so long that I'm sure that it all has to be put in the dumpster. 

We found vases from the Met Museum store, postcards from museum visits, weekly church bulletins, twenty years of Gourmet magazines, photo albums, junk jewelry, address books, antique lace, her father's naturalization papers, worn out shoes, and faded photos of godchildren. 

I also found reams of yellow notebooks of love letters that were never sent. She had dated an Italian doctor sometime in her late sixties. He ended up dumping her for a younger woman, but he must not have ended things cleanly. For months, she wrote him five page letters every day confiding in him about her day to day thoughts and memories from her childhood, but she never put them in the mail. One letter ended with the line, " I haven't heard from you in months. Where are you?" 

In the afternoon, an estate sale lady, Estelle, arrived to inspect the stuff. She said she needed to see $10,000 worth of stuff before she would agree to run the sale. The china was too common. The silver was plated. The piano was an off brand. There were a couple of nice pieces of furniture, but not enough. She said no to the sale. 

She was a chatty sort of woman who could have stayed for several hours, if we weren't in a rush to get back to NJ to pick up Ian from the bus. She did have some interesting gossip about the antique business. 

Estelle said that antiques were out of style. Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren had made old things cool a few years ago, but they weren't doing magazine spreads of old tea cups anymore. The Internet also killed the china market. The replacement dish companies had flooded the market with dishware. The only old furniture that had a chance of bringing in good money was mid-century modern pieces. Aunt Theresa's bedroom furniture was from the 40's and was Italian provincial – not cool. It was only worth $300. 

There has been some family drama about what to do with the contents of this house. We need to settle this estate very quickly, because my parents loaned Aunt Theresa money against the estate. They took out a second mortgage on their own house to keep Aunt Theresa in her home and out of the nursing home. We need to sell the house quickly to get my parents' money back. My sister and father want to just dump the entire contents of the house in a dumpster and walk away. My mom and I just can't stand to throw things away that someone could use. We are working on a middle ground. 

This experience has caused me to look at my own stuff in a new light. My prize possessions will be someone else's headache in the future. They will be dumpster filler. 

As we emptied the rooms, the charm of the home peaked through the dust. We could see the floor. The light streamed through the windows. With a coat of paint and new tile in the bathrooms, it wasn't hard to imagine a new family laughing, giving a baby a bath in the tub, making pasta in the kitchen. The series of windows in the front bedroom would make fabulous reading nook, once the broken wheelchairs and medical supplies were gone. We piled the unsent love letters in the bathroom that became the dumpster zone, and the bad karma left.