Imitating the Royal Family — Fourth Quarter Begins pg280

Colorful companion to my memoir The Incompetent Psychic

Me, my sister, Faun and the sign at yet another yard sale

Next to deal with after Dad and then Mom died was their house full of stuff. This story could continue through five more chapters describing the mountainous volume of things that Joan had amassed and inherited in 89 years of life, and what it took to sort, tag, sell, donate, store and move that mountain. I’ll try for a few paragraphs to spare you. (You can thank Kurt Vonnegut for this. I recently read ‘Pity the Reader’.)

A friend who owned a fabulous wedding mansion and tirelessly collected everything antique told us about once calling her yard sale an ‘estate sale’. A dealer showed up and asked who had died. “No one,” she replied, “My items are really nice and it sounded better.”

Picker guy snarked, “Lady. You can’t have an estate sale without a body.”

With this in mind, Catherine suggested we advertise as the Spinster Orphans since we had two bodies, and no kids of our own to leave all these things to. I made a sign and we continued sorting. — From Chapter 15

To be brutally honest, at this point in 2014 our parents Joan and Roy were no longer bodies, but two big cans of ashes waiting for better weather to ride a boat out into the Pacific Ocean. A five-bedroom house packed with eighty years…