Bellwood Trio

This was the house with hundreds of copies of a kid's book-version of Jurassic Park or The Lost World. The people holding the sale insisted that everyone take a copy. I can't remember which it was because I threw mine away the moment I got home.

And strangely enough, I didn't get any photos of them. But I did snap a shot of these warming mittens, which probably make some of you sigh with envy and wonder where you could get a pair, and the rest of us just scratch our heads.

Meet me at the train station at midnight. I'll be the one in the purple trenchcoat.

That's an awful lot of padlocks, and an awful lot of keys to go with them. It makes me wonder who bought this many padlocks, and why they hung on to them. ("Who knows -- I might have an awful lot of small things to lock up some day!") If you actually had a use for them, wouldn't you store the keys in a more organized way, so actually using one of them wouldn't be an exercise in frustration? I suppose the right person could have bought this entire box for a dollar, and then had hours of puzzle-solving fun on his or her hands. Me? I took the picture, paid for my purchases and got out.

Purchased: The Waltons' Christmas Album and Don Ho, The Don Ho Christmas Album LPs, $2.

Bellwood Leftovers

This was one of those last-stop sales. It's hard to say why it was such a mess. Maybe because ravenous estate salers had been upending it for two days straight. Maybe it had always existed several notches below Martha Stewart's best, and had just been allowed to go downhill from there.

I doubt whoever slept here allowed lightbulbs to be dropped just anywhere (lower-left corner) or kept their pillows on the floor next to that decent-enough mid-century chest of drawers.

You want to know what happens to the stuff that's left after an estate sale? There are a few possibilities. Sometimes the estate sale company auctions it online and takes a cut of the proceeds. That sounds like a tough way to make a living, but it beats working in a coal mine and its modern-day equivalents.

It can also revert to the people who own the house. But chances are they've already taken what they want and probably aren't thrilled to receive a bunch of beat-up suitcases, sour-smelling linens and a roomful of other random stuff. Even if some of it might be worth keeping.

Usually someone -- the owners or the company -- pays someone else a few hundred dollars to throw it all into a big truck at the end of the day and make it disappear. Don't you have room in your home -- and your heart -- for this psychedelic floral chest of drawers?

Who knows what happens to this stuff after that? It could end up in a landfill, a charity, or the storage spaces of incredibly canny collectors. After all, they're not making green ScotTissue in the 1000-sheet roll any more, and probably won't ever again.

This stuff might be worth a lot in the right market. There are probably a few places on Earth where these things might be considered riches.

And then there are things like these. Arrangements that you -- okay, I -- just want to buy up whole and donate to the Smithsonian Institution.

There's something kind of nice about this. I can imagine sitting down here and reading a book under that lamp and feeling perfectly content. At least for a little while.

The asking price was $45, and I'd bet that much it could have been purchased for $20 with no questions asked.

I hope it found a good home.