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Illustration by April Dela Noche Milne
The proud, red-brick house on Kendal Avenue in the Annex neighbourhood of Toronto had been in my wife’s family for some 60 years. Its pointed and leaded windows so reminiscent of a chapel, its deep and welcoming porch, and the sound of the little pond and waterfall out front, all set it apart. “They’re taking me out of here in a box,” my mother-in-law, Wilma Bender, had told me more than once. At the age of 94, she pretty well got her wish.
Oma, as we all called her (German for “Grandmother”), died in February. Pneumonia took her quickly and mercifully. She had come to Canada in 1953 with her husband, Jakob, and a babe in arms called Ulrike, whom I would marry several decades later. The Benders had arrived by ship with a metal steamer trunk full of pots and pans, blankets and tools; no English, no education beyond primary school and no assets. Jakob and Wilma got jobs working in the cafeteria of the same hospital where she would die – Toronto Western. The attending physician on that day was a former famed Olympic hockey player, Dr. Hayley Wickenheiser. Ah, but that’s another story.
Opa had died in 2007. He had somehow acquired the carpentry, plumbing and handyman skills necessary to keep not one, but two, tenant houses in repair. That was his method: scrimp and save, buy a house, hunker his family down in a few rooms and rent out all the others to fellow immigrants. Pants metal-clipped at the ankle, he would navigate the neighbourhood on his old three-speed bike, alert to sidewalk treasures. Opa was both apoplectic and overjoyed that perfectly good shoes, utensils, lumber and clothes were all routinely pitched. He was a keeper, not a heaver (but he was also a reducer, re-user, recycler). And so, over the years, that house built in 1912 filled up with his stuff and others’ stuff. Three floors, a basement, a shed and a garage: all packed with stuff.
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On a recent day in September, when the clouds threatened rain that never came, the entire front lawn, porch and driveway were teeming with possessions. A rolltop desk. A curved plywood chair our son Kurt had built while studying industrial design. Chairs ornate and funky and stolid, all in a row. Tables of every dimension. A homemade saw fashioned from a found blade and copper piping. The wicker bassinet we had used for our infant son. And on every flat surface, tchotchkes – knick-knacks and bric-a-brac.
It had taken seven of us – Ulrike, her sister Karen, and friends Maryam, Blanca, Maria-Elena, Verna, and myself – most of the morning to heft all the objects outside. There remained inside the larger stuff: a bed, a filing cabinet, Turkish rugs, dressers, a china cabinet. Half the stuff was free for the taking, and yet I despaired about a yard sale making even a dent in the enormous pile.
I anticipated a long and dreary day in my old hometown, one that in my view had taken a dark turn. Just weeks before, I had watched on Bloor Street as a pedestrian – who was almost mowed down by a step van – kick its side in a rage. And then there was the world beyond, where wildfires raged, where autocrats and billionaires thrived while goodwill and community-mindedness staggered. The dark clouds that day seemed both real and metaphorical.
But then people came. And they were … nice. Really, really nice. A man who had just become an “uncle” happily took away the bassinet. But not before he and a sculptor volunteered to help move some heavier items from the basement. A toddler with her Portuguese mother was delighted when I invited her to select one of the dozen teddy bears on offer. A young mother with piercings in her nose arrived on a mechanized three-wheel bicycle and selected a wet suit – from the free section.
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The yard sale afforded an exchange of stories. Ulrike and I, for example, chatted with a Québécoise who had long taught sculpture at an art college. I told her that among the keepsakes I had rescued from the Kendal Avenue house were some 50 ornate brass door knobs and a dungeon-keeper’s ring that held dozens of black skeleton keys. I have in mind a sculpture/installation, a kind of homage to the house and all who ever lived there.
I had been sick with the thought that much material might end up in a landfill, but I was heartened and astonished that so many things landed softly. A young man from Kenya (a member of Maria-Elena’s church who was helping move furniture onto a truck) found books in the pile that he can use in his computer studies. His Cuba-born associate got a full set of bodybuilder’s weights. Another young man bought two landscape paintings by Tante Otti (Jakob Bender’s sister).
Part of my job that day was to deploy my car as delivery van for unwieldy objects chosen by cyclists or pedestrians, such as those paintings. And so I met the woman on Spadina Avenue who longs to return to England, and the young man across the road from her fresh from Ukraine. And the man whose great-grandmother had lived in the house on Kendal, and to whom Ulrike gave the grand tour.
A day I had dreaded took me by surprise. I felt sad at saying goodbye to the house, grief all over again at Oma and Opa’s passing, and discomfort at seeing their things picked over by strangers. And yet the strangers were universally kind and grateful and respectful, and they lifted my spirits. It seems trite to say, but trite can be true: There are more good people in this world than bad, and the yard sale offered proof.
Lawrence Scanlan lives in Kingston, Ont.