The Globe and Mail
The beneficiary: “Brooke” is a 60-year-old retired teacher who shares a mid-sized house in Toronto (this will prove relevant soon) with her husband. Brooke acted as executor to her maternal uncle, who died in 2020, and as power of attorney for his wife, her aunt by marriage, who passed away two years later. They’d been close since Brooke was a teenager.
The inheritance: After Brooke’s aunt died, Brooke became the reluctant owner of her ample and beloved collection of Majolica pottery. “They’re originally from England, they’re very colourful and flamboyant, they’re plates and teacups and kettles,” says Brooke. Some of them are wilder still. “We’re talking plates that look like oysters and cabbages and tomatoes.” One particular standout plate had a life-sized porcelain crab in its centre.
Though her uncle was lukewarm on the pottery itself, Brooke’s aunt absolutely loved them and that was enough for him. “I think he loved that she loved them so much, so they travelled all over the place to collect them together,” she says. Their hobby across a lifetime added up fast: Besides those on display on her aunt’s walls and shelves and in her kitchen, their basement held upwards of 40 packed boxes of pottery – all of them Brooke’s now.
What she did with them: Luckily for her husband, Brooke’s Toronto home is not an art gallery of tacky ceramic fruits. “I picked four or five that I really liked, but that’s enough,” says Brooke, who is luckily free of the guilt that might bother others. “It’s not my collection and it’s not my passion.” (Music to her husband’s ears, surely.)
That said, money would be nice and, since her aunt and uncle had insured their Majolicas for $65,000, Brooke had high hopes the pottery could be sold. “I was really excited that they might be worth something and hoped an auction house would take the whole collection,” she says. But the only auction house that was interested was south of the border. “We would have had to travel with all those boxes to the States to have them seen in person, and there was no guarantee they’d buy them.”
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Plan B was to sell them individually online, which initially seemed promising. “I’d see pieces selling on Etsy for upwards of $5,000,” Brooke says. “In reality, even the best pieces went for only a couple of hundred dollars. Most were under $50.” Soon enough, the effort far outweighed the profit.
Ultimately, she decided to break up the collection and let anyone interested pick a piece: First family members, then friends, then friends of friends. “If someone liked something and could appreciate it, it was theirs. Please take it and love it,” says Brooke. Anything left over was donated in hopes that it might find a similar fate.
The very best and most creative use of her Majolicas? “When it came time to bury my aunt and uncle, I thought, Forget an urn! I picked four lovely pieces and put the ashes in them,” says Brooke. “The funeral director said, ‘These are really nice, are you sure?’ Oh, I’m sure.”
What she learned: Having her eyes opened to the world of collections, Brooke now knows they’re everywhere. “It’s amazing what people have and keep. I have a friend who collects McDonald’s toys; his apartment’s balcony is stacked with Tupperware containers of them.” Good for him if he loves them and is having fun, but Brooke has learned the hard way that mostly everything is worth almost nothing. “People think their collections are worth big money, but in this day and age, they’re just…not.”
While his wife may have disagreed, Brooke’s wise uncle understood this well. “I remember my uncle saying that the money didn’t matter and it wasn’t about that. The real value was the enjoyment his wife got from them – and there was plenty of that,” she says.
Following her Majolica adventure, Brooke’s already thinking about how she’ll go about getting rid of things before someone else has to do it for her. “I’ve come to terms that a lot of what we have is just stuff – even your special collection of whatever it is,” she says. In this case, the old idiom about loving something and letting it go is particularly poignant. “Get rid of it ahead of time. Whether it’s jewellery or stamps or pottery, give it away to anyone who will appreciate it like you do.”
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