A Chronicle of Life
August 23, 2005 at 10:44 AM
by Ashleigh
Today while I was browsing Ebay I came up with the saddest chronicle of a woman's life that I think I've ever seen. The items were sold by one of those people who buys up estate sale items and this is how it went.
The first items in the sale were books on how to be a good wife and mother, cookbooks for families, sewing patterns for kiddies' pyjamas and clothing all circa 1960. Halloween patterns for children's dressup, women's clothing in sizes 10 - 12. Then we move on to marriage self help manuals, books on how to spice up your married sex life, Mills & Boon and Barbara Cartland, patterns for clothing for boys and men, patterns for Junior Misses.
Further up the line we find religious books, patterns for prom dresses, college textbooks, more religious self-help, patterns for women in sizes 18 - 22. Then, books on how weight affects your marriage, American Diabetic Association cookbooks, cookbooks with titles like 'Losing Fat while Keeping Flavour'. And finally, books on being single again after divorce. Oh, and let me not forget the completed cross stitch pictures selling for $2.50.
From looking through these auctions I can discern a few things. This lady raised and sent her kids to college. One of them studied Engineering, the other Psychology. She was a diabetic who had problems with her weight and believed that those problems led to the breakdown of her marriage. She was probably a housewife who had never worked during her married life. She turned to religion to try and help her through rough patches. She liked to read romantic novels. There were some young kids patterns from the 1990s so she must have had grandchildren. Her children didn't want the things she left after she died, and especially not her stitching.
It made for rather a thought-provoking morning, my trawl through Ebay.