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progress in the kitchen. This is actually
quite darling in a quaint kind of way,” she said to me.
    “Well, vintage is in,” I answered. “But maybe
not quite so worn vintage.”
    The steps made a comforting creak as we rose
to the next floor. Peering in both bedrooms, Connie chose the
smallest to use. “I’d pick the bigger room but it could take days
to dig out to reach the bed. I didn’t realize Grandpa was such a
hoarder. I haven’t been back here since that big blow-up between
him and our moms all those years ago.”
    “No, me neither. I only saw grandfather at
the few Christmas’s and other celebrations he deigned to attend.
Did your mom ever tell you what the big fight was about?” I
asked.
    “No. Apparently it wasn’t ‘appropriate’ for
me to hear. I tried to hide and listen in when anyone was talking
about it but they were so careful, I was always caught before the
juicy stuff,” Connie answered. “I wonder if they’d tell us now?
Maybe it was about sex?” She laughed.
    “Eeww. He did have a bevy of beauties hanging
around all the time. He was so mean I wonder what they saw in
him.”
    “Dollar signs,” Connie answered laughing.
“Maybe he had a pile of cash stuffed in a mattress. There had to be
some money to buy all this junk. Who knows? I’m going to put some
scudgie clothes on so we can clear this out before bedtime.”
    The room had two single beds with a
nightstand between them but all the remaining space was filled with
boxes of stuff, some open, some closed. I tried to squeeze around a
few things to reach the bed and tripped, nearly spraining my ankle
in the process. “I’m not sure which is worse—the claustrophobia
from all the clutter, or the danger of falling and breaking my neck
on all this crap.”
    “I couldn’t agree more,” Connie said, looking
around. “Hey, this was our mothers’ room wasn’t it?”
    “Yeah,” I answered, looking around at the
charming pale gray wallpaper with pink and white flowers dancing
down the wall. I remembered seeing a picture of my mother as a
child with the same wallpaper behind her. Two prints of a boy and a
girl praying hung on the wall, one over each bed. I imagined two
teenagers, their childhood room unchanged even as they outgrew
it.
    We started stacking the boxes and loose items
in the other spare bedroom, but since it was already full to start
with, it didn’t take long before we couldn’t even pull the door
closed. The last of the boxes we carried downstairs and piled in
the dining room in the little space remaining. That took care of
that problem and created a new one. Now there was no more walking
space in the dining room.
    “I guess we’d better get our mothers over
here tomorrow to start deciding what we are going to do with the
stuff in all these boxes. Most of it is probably just junk. Maybe
we should just get a dumpster and start going through them one by
one,” I said, wiping the sweat from my forehead and sneezing
twice.
    “Bless you. We should also have a pile for
eBay, Craig’s List and maybe a garage sale pile, although garage
sales are a lot of work for very little money,” Connie
answered.
    “Do you think anyone’s going to want this old
stuff?” I asked. “It looks like it’s been sitting here for
years.”
    “You never know what we’re going to find in
all those boxes. You’d be surprised at what you can sell on eBay.
Most of the items are vintage after all. It’s amazing what you can
pick up from garage sales, estate sales and the like, which is
probably where he got most of this stuff.”
    “I wouldn’t even know where to start. Do you
really think someone will buy old cards and Halloween decorations
from forty years ago?” I asked Connie, that sense of despondency
returning. “We’d have to figure out what stuff is going for, take
pictures, guess on shipping charges, post it. Then if someone buys
it we’d have to actually send it to them. Do you think it will be
worth all the time and