The Last Ten Days--City Hall and Estate Sales

 Photo: Old glove from keymancollectibles.com.  The one I bought looks much like this one.  This one is in better shape, but mine's older.  Yeah, yeah, condition is everything, I know.

Sorry I've been gone for the past ten days.  I was really ill, and my PC is under plastic upstairs due to the constant (but very necessary and very well-done) renovations the last ten days, and plus I'm a bit behind on work for the job that pays The Man.  But some things have been happening these last few weeks, so here are a few quick shots:

--I went to an estate sale today, which is a great place to pick because the company gets paid more to get rid of everything and not as much to get the most they can for everything.  The family hiring the estate sale company usually just wants the house cleared so they can sell the house, and so they usually don't care how much they get for things.  The company will say prices are final on the ads, but that's never the case.  So the long and short of it is that I got about 100 CDVs and Cabinet pictures (pics from between 1870 and 1890), eight baseball bats from the 20s - 40s, a foot-powered scooter from between 1895-1905, a baseball glove that I confidently place in the 1910s (and maybe as early as 1905)--all for a hundred bucks.  I could sell each of the 100 CDVs and Cabinet pics for $5 a piece on Ebay or Etsy (which would be underselling many of them) and thereby make my $100 investment into $500, and that's just with the pics.  The bats would go for $15 to $50 apiece, as soon as I can date them, and the scooter would go for $25 to $40 by itself as well.  And the glove would go for about $35 to $50 because it is clearly very old.  All of these things are very highly collectible.  I might even keep the scooter for myself; I rode it up and down my street earlier.

The key is to bundle and buy in bulk, and then sell them piecemeal.  Not very sexy, perhaps, but this will help keep me busy during those winter nights and days, and make decent part-time money, too.

You would think that a man who had collected bats and a glove from the 1910s and 1920s, and who had a book about collecting old, vintage baseball cards, would've had old, vintage baseball cards.  But there were none, and I asked the people running the estate sale, and they'd never seen any there.  I left them my card and begged them to call me if they found any there.  If you've got bats and a glove from the teens and twenties, and if you've got a book about collecting baseball cards from the 1910s and 1920s, then you should have baseball cards from the 1910s and 1920s.  But, no.  Hmmmm.....I suspect someone from the family, or a neighbor, or someone, walked off with those.  I would've spent a very large sum for those.  I hope they call.

--My new favorite person is Jan, from my town's City Hall.  I needed to get a copy of a deed for a property of mine, and since this house is being renovated, I couldn't find the deed here.  (Truth be told, I probably wouldn't have found it had the house not been under renovations.)  So I had to face City Hall, which can be an arduous experience, not to mention an afternoon killer.  At work, I looked up my town's City Hall website and I found a department with a name that sounded like it might be what I needed.  I sent an email to the department, in essence saying what I was looking for, and mentioning that I hoped this was the right place to ask for it, and if not, where was the right place, and what did I have to do?  Here's the email response I got (sit down while you're reading this):

Good morning Mr. Belanger,

I’ve printed a copy of your deed for you and will leave it in the main office (Recorder of Deeds) in the main town hall.  It’s ready for you, so you may pick it up this afternoon.  There is no charge, I printed it as a courtesy for you.

Best,

Jan

Archives Clerk
My response to that (after I picked myself off the floor):

That's awesome!  Thank you so much!  I really appreciate it.   And now Jan the Archives Clerk's response to that: Most welcome sir! Is this woman awesome, or what?  I don't care if she's a 70-year old, wrinkled and frail-thin woman working part-time or volunteering at City Hall, I'm finding out who this woman is, and I am marrying her.

"The Little Room" by Madeline Yale Wynne

 photo: Picaresque but creepy photo of Madeline Yale Wynne's final little room (sorry), in the Berkshire Mountains, from Find A Grave's website.  (I couldn't find a Wikipedia page or anything else less creepy.)

The latest in the series from The Library of America, this for Week #42, "The Little Room" was first published in Harper's Magazine in 1895.  (Because of this, one assumes that when a character asks another if they'll be heard "in the car," she must be referring to a train; funny how it's so assumed by the author and characters that this would be the case, as the automobile itself had just been invented maybe three years before, and it hadn't yet entered the vernacular as a "car.")  You can read the story here.  It's very short and very easy to read, though you might come out of it underwhelmed as I did.

I've never heard of the author or the story before, despite the Library's insistence that it is a heavily anthologized and well-known story.  And I'm a pretty well-read guy, too.  Wynne never wrote anything else of value, apparently, though artisans in the Berkshires would remember her as a supporter of those local arts, and as quite the artisan herself.

The author might be more of a story than her story, but we'll start with that first.  (Skip the remaining paragraphs if you want to read the story first.  If so, do that first, now, and then come back.)

The framework of the story is interesting.  The beginning is mostly told via conversation, as per Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; this was the norm for late Victorian stories.  Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was written this way, too, if I remember right.  Anyway, you've got a newly married young couple and they're on their way to visit the bride's reclusive and eccentric half-aunts.  She tells the story of how her mother was brought up there for most of her childhood, and afterwards her mother grew up in Brooklyn.  When her mother returned to the aunt's the day of her own marriage, she was horrified and mystified to find that the room she more or less grew up in--and was memorably sick in for some time as a youth--had been done over and made into a china closet.  When she asked the aunts about it, they had no idea what she was talking about, and said so with old-time New England steadfastness, and with no emotion at all, not even behind the eyes.  The mother, however, remembered every single little thing about the room, and some memorable conversations in the room, and the reader agrees with the bride telling the story that her mother couldn't have made all that up, and that there's something weird going on in that house and with the aunts.  Ultimately, the mother never recovers from the weirdness and dies at a young-ish age.

So the bride and her husband get there, and he immediately notices that they're served with gilt-edged china, so there has to be a china room somewhere.  (I keep mine in a hutch, and in one of the kitchen cabinets, but whatever.)  They investigate what the woman had said should be a little room, but it's just a china closet, and the husband basically rolls his eyes at his new wife and acts a bit verbally condescending.  The bride asks the aunt about it, and she gets the same answer that her mother had, in just the same stoic way.  The aunts didn't even remember that the bride's mother had asked them about the china closet/little room as well.  The new bride takes a long while to get over this, but she finally does, and she and her husband move to Europe and have a few kids.  (The reader assumes he's gotten over the condescending attitude, as well.)

Fast forward five years.  The wife asks her cousin to visit the aunts to tell them goodbye for her, as she's now in Europe and had been too afraid to go say goodbye to them herself.  Her cousin agrees to do this, and intends on bringing another woman with her.  But they have a failure to communicate, and as it turns out, they each go by herself at different times.  As it happens in stories like this, the two women get together with their kids (Where are the husbands?) while camping, and they tell each other their stories, each believing beforehand that the other had blown her off, and that she had gone there while the other one hadn't.

One of the women saw a little room, and wrote to the newly married couple in Europe about it.  The other had seen just a china closet.  They argue for awhile, each believing that the other one's lying.  Finally, they decide to go back to the house together.  When they're close, they're told by a local that the house had burned to the ground the night before, with everything in it.  The reader is never told what happened to the aunts.

And that's it.  The story is told with a little more unease about it, and I suppose it's somewhat effective, maybe.  The Library says of the theme that some see it as a woman's need to have a room of her own, which I get; the Library also says others see a "closet of domestic confinement."  I can see that, too, in the story.  But I can't say I agree with literary scholar Alfred Bendixen (go to the head of the class if you've ever heard of this guy, or of Madeline Yale Wynne, for that matter), who says that the story is "one of the most effective 'puzzle stories' ever written."  Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King have written more effective "room" short stories than this, as has Arthur Conan Doyle.  "The Yellow Wallpaper" works better for me as a "room" story with a feminist bent, as well.

Are the aunts domestic servants?  Well, I guess, except they never married, and they actually have a former slave on the grounds to help them, too.  So what husbands or sons do they serve?  The china is theirs, and their company is theirs--and very infrequent, too.  (I might actually have more people over.)  And the story is very feminist and rather easy to see that way, so I don't know what Bendixen was so puzzled about.

I see the flip-flopping china closet / small room situation as an extended metaphor of how women are expected to shell out the china from a china closet as they serve their husbands and families and entertain their guests, but how actually what a woman (and yours truly) really needs is a room of her own, to just be her own individual, independent and creative self in.  The aunts, after all, never married or had kids.  Wink, wink.

Which segues nicely to the author.  Madeline Yale Wynne was, in fact, the daughter of the guy who created the lock company.  Yale was also a heckuva artisan himself, apparently, as he taught the craft to his daughter and sons.  According to the Find A Grave website (No, not creepy at all; I Googled her name and that's what came up first.  No one's made a Wikipedia page of her, I guess), she married Henry Winn in 1865, when she was 18.  They had two sons before they separated in 1874.  By 1883 she was sharing her studio and home with a Miss Annie Putnam.  (Ah-ha! you say.  Fits the story a bit, right?  Except the aunts really were sisters to each other, I think.  But they had their own secret little room, apparently in a Victorian/Freudian way.  Perhaps that room was a china closet only when they had family over, yes?)  They stayed together for about 30 years, until she died.  Putnam put together her various unpublished writings, none of them of any note, and printed them posthumously.  And somewhere in there, Madeline Winn changed her last name to Wynne, thereby still sticking to the social mores of carrying the (ex-)husband's last name, while yet slapping him across the face at the same time.

There's a little of that in the story as well.  The little room was the elephant in the room that the aunts never spoke of, and it apparently never bothered them at all that a village of people kept asking them about the china closet / small room thing.  It's as if they were like, "Nope, la la la, not there, nope, no room there, la la la..."  There's a symbol or metaphor with the chintz going on in the story, too, as the very mention of it almost (but just almost) causes one of the aunts to blush, but I'm not sufficiently up on my fabrics to figure that out.

The Past Seven Days

Photos: My table and chair, mentioned below.  (Notice the cool drawer in the last pic.)  Please comment or email and let me know exactly what these things are--year and model.  Guesses and approximations are okay.  Thanks!

Wrote and sent the author bio for a spec. fiction short story, "Hide the Weird," to be published THIS MONTH in Space and Time Magazine.  (Please check out the link--and I apologize for the unabashed self-promotion.)

A very short nonfiction piece, "Someone To Come Home To," accepted for publication.  Details to come.

Another short story, this one a mystery, possibly to be accepted soon.  Crossing my fingers and staying positive--which is why I mention it here to begin with.  Details to come.

Recovering from strep, which may have not completely gone away.  Overall feeling: bleh.

Bad headache last two days; it is a killer today.  So much for Friday night plans.

Getting the house ready for Round Two of tearing down wallpaper, painting the walls and treating the floors.  Lots of cleaning to do first, and organizing the clutter.  Furniture has to be moved out.  Money has to be saved and spent.  Lots of it.  It'll be worth it, though; the living room looks like a million bucks--and cost about as much.  But who knew there was a great-looking wall ready to be coated blue, and strong white oak beneath all that old carpeting?

1895 round writing table placed in the upper corner of said living room.  (Table's in great shape and was bought at a yard sale for $20.)  Area rugs bought for this, and for the small dinner table behind the couch/in front of the fireplace.  Finding these area rugs took an exasperating three-plus hours, but they came cheap and look great.  Putting all those felt things on the bottom of the furniture legs was also a chore.

Harried and exhausting part of my job accomplished on-time this past Monday, which screwed up my sleeping patterns and possibly created my current state of blah-ness.

All in all, though, a great week between posts.

How did yours go?  Please share.

And, by the way, does anyone know exactly what year and model the table (or chair) is?  Any possible idea would be appreciated.  Just throw it to me and I'll look it up.  Thanks!