by Gay Newton
Have you ever met a person that has a collection that has gotten out of control? The behavior may border on hoarding. We discovered that one of our aunts was this way. She lived by herself for twenty years after our uncle died. She was a very social and fun woman. She was always dressed very fashionably. She enjoyed shopping and visiting people. She would invite groups of people out to restaurants and pay for the meal. She said it was easier for her to do that than to cook. When she died she left her belongings to my two sisters and me. When we went to her house we realized why she did not have people over. Her house was packed with things that she had bought. There were narrow paths to allow you to get from room to room in the house.
I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It’s the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
As we started to sort through things we realized that several of the boxes contained handbags and purses. My sisters started laughing when they saw this. It was a running argument with our aunt when she was alive as to what to call them. Handbags and purses were her trademark. She always had very unique handbags and purses. She always referred to them as her clutches. She had a habit of misplacing them so when ever she was leaving a place she would have everyone searching for her clutch. I had never stopped to consider that she would have to store the hand bags and purses some where.
Jewelry was another thing that she collected in mass quantities as well as shoes to match all the clutches. The shoes were piles on the floor of her closet. One other closet was stacked with shoe boxes. At first we assumed that they contained shoes, but when we opened them we discovered that they were full of jewelry. She had costume jewelry mixed in with semi precious jewelry. We counted seventeen shoe boxes that were filled in addition she had several large jewelry boxes on her dresser.
We thought the task of going through her things and packing up her house would be fun and would take us a couple of weekends. As we started going through things we realized that we had a giant task ahead of us. We did not want to bring in an estate company to pack things, because we had no idea of what was in the house. We each took a week of vacation to pack, sort, and divide the things. I never would have guessed that our well dressed fun aunt was living with more merchandise than most department stores carry.