Buried Treasure

If you haven't read about our packrattery before, you might want to catch up. See this post (and absolutely read the comments), and this one, or maybe this one.

When we first started cleaning up the rattery three years ago my uncle was still alive. We thought he was coming home, but would need to be in a wheelchair, so we needed to create wider aisles through the towering piles of stuff. So four of us worked quickly and hard during one week, shifting things, guiltily throwing away things, and hopefully widening the pathways.

He did not come home from the hospital.

A few months later several of his relatives spent a good solid week again pushing hard trying to make some sense of the chaos. I had nightmares where he came back to see me, angry that I had thrown away his seventh grade art project, or the ashtray he made in sixth grade or the box of perhaps fifty year old macaroni and cheese (I am not making these things up). We had a yard sale with some things, and we donated a truck load to another yard sale.

Then we slowed down the pace, just picking through a little bit each week, and sometimes not visiting it for weeks at a time. It's indescribably depressing and heartbreaking to me to go there, but I don't want to dwell on that.

What I want to do is paint this picture for you- let's just look at the living room.
There's a huge stone fireplace my great grandfather had built. Inside it is full of pottery crocks, the sort once used to store sour kraut or butter or cheese. There are card tables we set up when we cleared out other things and they are covered with things we once sorted into categories, but I don't know what the categories are anymore. Things seem to have gotten a bit mixed. There are hundreds of record albums, thousands of salt and pepper shakers, dozens of toby mugs, family pictures, cabinets with depression glass and dollar store garbage all jumbled together in a mixed bag. There's a pile of old seashells, big ones that you don't find much anymore, a few old lamps, boxes of old letters, a huge old fashioned television console (about three feet long) that we think is broken, but we can't get to it yet because of all the records in front of it. The plaster is falling off the walls in spots. The light fixtures are the original ones installed in the 1940s. The floors are hardwood. Here and there are a few boxes of stuff we sorted and packed up two or three years ago. Sometimes we left them there because this house wasn't done yet and we didn't have anywhere to put them in the old house.

At least, that's what we thought the boxes were. Just this week Granny Tea, the HG and I were there at the house cleaning out the last of the last cabinets left in the dining room (hooray!!!), and we were carrying out the boxes we'd packed to the van (one box for things I'm keeping for now, one box of things for the antique booth, one box for things that we suspect have a matching piece somewhere in the Rattery). We went back in the living room to map out a plan of attack for next time, and Granny Tea nudged with her toe the two boxes I thought she'd packed and asked, "What's in here?" And I looked at them and said, "I dunno. I thought you packed it." And they basically said, "I dunno. I thought you packed it."

So we opened the top box up and it is full of china and glassware all wrapped up in newspaper. The item on top was wrapped in a piece of newspaper from 1994, so then we knew that none of us had packed it. We brought those two boxes home for further perusal. Today the HG opened up the second and found, neatly laid on top, an announcement for an estate auction from 1984.

So twenty plus years ago my uncle went to this auction, bought at least one box of stuff, brought it home and set it down somewhere in the living room and there it's been ever since.

When we unpacked it, we found, among many other things, two sets of what we have learned is a Florentine #2 yellow gravy boat and platter by Hazel-Atlas glass company, also, I think, called 'Poppy.' You can see a picture here. She's asking 90 dollars for hers, but we saw another set go for just 25.00 on e-bay, so we don't know what to charge. That picture- I think does not do it justice. The yellow is much sunnier. Why are there two? I don't know. Why did he buy that box? I don't know. Did something in particular appeal to him? I don't know. Did he buy it as a boxed lot or did he carefully pick out individual pieces that had some special merit in his eyes? I don't know. I just know he brought the box home and apparently never opened it again, so there it's been.

Sitting in his living room, covered up by old newspaper and cardboard, collecting dust, attracting spiders and other creepy crawlies for over 20 years, part of a miscellaneous collection of genuine garbage, junk, trash, and treasures- the mind boggles. At least mine does- every single week.

Should anybody else find themselves in a similar predicament, this book is one we've found most helpful for identifying glassware.

This book is most helpful for maintaining a sense of sanity and balance through it all.