The old couple had owned a “variety store” in downtown Pullman for forty years. When I was a kid it was a huge adventure to wander down the isles of toys, knick-knacks and “sundries.” For a quarter, I could always find two or three really cool treasures.
Whenever anything in the store became obsolete, the owners would take it home and store it in their house (one of the very few large Victorian homes in Pullman). By the time the couple retired in their late sixties, the house was pretty much full of all this old merchandise (still in the original boxes). They continued to live in the house until their deaths (both of them were in their late 80’s).
The husband preceded the wife in death, and she passed away in January a couple of years later. The house sat unoccupied until June when school was out, the relatives drove over from Seattle and filled a 40 cubic yard dumpster with the “junk” from the house. That hardly made a dent, so they drove to Pullman every weekend for the entire summer, filling a dumpster each trip.
When fall came, and their children had to go back to school, the relatives called me while they were in town. By now, they had emptied the house except for a small part of the basement and wanted me to finish the job and clean the house. Their dumpster for that weekend contained very little material, but as soon as they left, I climbed in to see what was there. Virtually everything was salable, including a set of leather bound medical books that had belonged to the husband’s father, but none of the merchandise from the store remained.