A Family Portrait
Launching Pad, 2018
One of the things that my husband and I enjoy doing together is going to estate sales. In the beginning, it felt morbid going through someone else’s things. I would often wonder whether the owner of the house died or is still alive but has transitioned to a nursing facility. A home that contained a family’s history has suddenly become a thrift store. 50% off on Saturdays and 75% off on Sundays.
On the other hand, I felt that our purchases could help the families pay for medical or funeral expenses. After all, if they really didn’t need/want the money, why bother selling any of it? They could’ve just donated everything to Goodwill or the Salvation Army. Plus, our purchases helped keep stuff out of landfills and we saved money on things that can be bought second hand rather than buying them at Walmart for triple the cost. Tossing my guilt in the trash, Saturday morning estate sales became longstanding dates for us.
Some houses had massive amounts of things. Collected or hoarded, the line seemed gray. Trash or treasure? It depends on who’s looking. We acquired random things - from spatulas to steel pipes; to vintage sewing machines and first edition books; and to just about anything that took our fancy. We gave our money and happily skipped to our truck with our treasures. Many times, we did wonder if we were becoming hoarders ourselves. What a dreadful thought!
But we didn't keep everything we bought. Some things fit quite nicely into our eclectic-themed home. The others, we've re-sold and made a little bit of money on the side.
One Saturday, we visited a home with thousands of marbles - literally! We were bewildered. Why would anybody collect that many marbles? Just the same, my husband bought one set of marbles. We were a bit skeptical if these would sell. Much to our surprise, there was an actual demand.
One marble sold for more than three times the purchase price of the whole set. My husband got sick to his stomach. Dadgumit! We could’ve bought the whole lot of marbles and we’d be millionaires right now. Well ok, that’s stretching it. But who knew that such a seemingly ordinary toy of our childhood would be worth something? Certainly, not us.
Missed opportunity...yes. We often look back to that day with some sort of angst. Hahaha. And although we’ve collected a few more marbles since that fateful day, we’ve never found the same type of marbles. Our friends tease us that we’ve become insanely obsessed with marbles. They could be right.
When it was time for me to paint another picture, my thoughts drifted to our growing marble collection. Vivid and captivating - each one was distinct in its own blend of colors. It reminded me how each member of our family was unique.
If you've never played a game of marbles, marbles are categorized as "shooter" or "duck.” The smaller marbles are the ducks which are put in the middle of a chalk-drawn ring that is 3 feet in diameter. A player kneels outside the ring and uses a shooter to shoot a duck outside the ring. Each time you hit a duck outside the ring, you get another turn until you miss and then the next person plays. The player who shoots the most ducks outside the ring wins.
I painted the ducks with colors that I felt represented each of our children's personality. And then I painted my husband and me as shooters based on marbles from our own collection that have peculiar colors that I love. The reality is that we each have our quirks that make us so different from each other. But we have the same goal as parents - to prepare our children to grow up and be good humans and hope that any mistakes that we've committed would not damage them for life. Hahaha. Parents, you know what I mean.
Whether we like it or not, our home is a launching pad - a lifetime in the making. We pray and we do the best we can, with the limited time we've been given, with these gifts we call our children.