Stay Away From Auctions

Who doesn’t love a good auction? The bling, the crap, the undefined. I follow family footsteps when it comes to auctions, so what I buy is not my fault.

Auctioneers recognize us, size us up when we walk through the door–a glint in our eye?  They send somebody into a back room and scoop up all the stuff that didn’t sell the week before. They recognize, ‘caught up in the moment’.  I was put on a mailing list of upcoming events. I haven’t heard from him in quite some time, like ten years. Did I fall from favor? Or perhaps he felt I might still be busy with the four grocery carts of wallpaper he sold me, which I gleefully loaded one roll after another into my truck, visualizing the potential of redecorating my entire house for $25.00. That’s back when the world was stuck on wallpaper.

The main bathroom was my first target. I ran everybody out of the house so I could concentrate on my project. In the first panel, I noticed mis-prints and uneven stamping of the pattern. I unfurled another roll–the same.  That auctioneer’s reason for eliminating me from the mailing list was coming to light–Let’s throw that stuff  in the auction…I just saw a lady who’s looking for a project–

I ripped down the paper and started again, but each roll had a problem–weeping dye, uneven vertical stripes, blurry spots. Only one roll out of 248. My mother-in-law asked me to paper a couple walls in her house. I found enough of one pattern to do that, and it turned out nice. I found several rolls of another to give a friend who papered her kitchen just before it went on the market. Okay, good, again. The pheasants over brazen-red became my laundry room design, a small room that I could close off in an emergency.

Wallpaper gets overdone in a house real fast, so we used it for BB target practice, plucking roosters off their perches, or blasting flower pedals with holes. We made wallpaper cut-outs and pasted or glued them to poster boards to specialize school projects, decorated shoeboxes, lined shelves–anything to use it up. The remaining 219 rolls were parked on the top rack in the shop, where it remained for many years. One day it left–just disappeared, and nobody missed it. I didn’t even ask.

How’s that different then when my mother bought half a truckload of gift wrap for $12. It was all pretty crummy and nobody wanted to wrap their gifts in any of it except the red paper with miniature white hearts which was perfect for Valentines Day. But how many gifts are given at Valentine’s? So we made it work on Mother’s Day…Secretary’s Day (though treading lightly there!), best-friends-forever day, here’s-a-box-of-cookies day, and tooth fairy boxes.

One time she used a roll of awful green gift wrap for a picnic tablecloth. Clever! we thought, until she peeled it up and the water and heat had caused the dye to bleed through onto the wood table, leaving it a remarkable blue-green, which actually turned out okay because it looked better than before.

Mom ridded our home of gift wrap in many ways, passing rolls out to anybody who knocked on the door. One time she put together sets of all the different wrapping paper, lashed them together with colorful twine and gave the sets for a community auction. The heart-paper gone and none of the other awful paper useful, somebody began sneaking a few rolls at a time out to the trash can, until the gift wrap, poof! just disappeared.  She never asked.

It’s the twenty-two pair of stainless steel curved scissors that has followed me through the years. Curved scissors cut circles, and my bid picked up  them all with one swift sweep on the cheap, cheap, cheap. Why would anybody need curved scissors, you ask? If you figure it out, I’ve got just the thing for you. Do curved scissors even work? All too well, but not for a straight line. Okay, okay, give me some credit. I bid on the lot just to get the single pair of regular, straight scissors in the bunch. Good scissors can be expensive, and I had to take them all–twenty-three pair– to become the proud owner of the one…all for $2.00. I’ve taken a lot of heat over those curved scissors, trying to explain them over the years to anybody who opened that drawer and took them out. But when I have to cut a circle, I’m ready for it, and you’re not.

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