Desperately Seeking Salem

Well, you missed it. You decided to take a bike ride, or go to the coast, or pick some blueberries. You missed the tiny placard at the bottom of a traffic sign on South Commercial, or you saw it and never imagined that treasures could be so modestly advertised. You drove on by. You missed out. On… the… chance… to…

Comb through the accumulation of a life!

We were late to this party ourselves. By the time we arrived at the estate sale of a former Willamette music professor, who had worked at the university for four decades, there wasn’t  much left — just enough to hint at what this sale might have looked like when it opened on Friday.

This man, who clearly had lifelong fascinations with art and objects and music, was a collector — pipes, rubbings, old Playboys, photography materials, carved wooden objects, tools, 50′s-era Christmas decorations (see above), antique toys and trains, costume jewelry, hats, phonographs, old LP’s,  music instruments — whew!

I picked up:

Chenille tablecloth
Gingham tablecloth
Wooden marble ramp
Carved tobacco pipe
Four fuzzy Christmas reindeer
Box of roughly 3,567 toothpicks
Halloween basket
Swiss Army knife
Bag of 14 rolls of ribbons

For just $38, I’m ready for the holidays.

Estate sales can be sad affairs. But not this one. This one was a celebration of the curatorial spirit! A grand explosion of a life accumulated in madeline tins, antique cuckoo clocks and a single pair of lederhosen (actually, add that to the list above)!

This is how people live — in a mess of items bought one-by-one over a century. You can’t get this aesthetic in a catlog.

How do you find out about good estate sales in Salem?

I’ve been talking to some of my young mother friends, and we’ve stumbled upon a tired family truism that, like all parenting discoveries,  may be old news to you but revelatory to the new parent:

A new couch improves your life by 150%.

We finally found said new couch in Salem, but before I get to that, let me tell you about our old couch.

Our old couch came from a second-hand store in Iowa City and, at just two seats wide, was small enough to fit in a tiny student apartment. You might call that a love seat, but when it’s all you’ve got, you, too, might couch your phrasing a little differently. Ours was grey and lovingly cat-proof and it got us through six seasons of LOST. But there wasn’t a whole lotta lovin’ going on there.

Old Grey Couch couldn’t stand up to late nights with the baby, though. After two months of periodically sleeping on the couch with our little lamb, my husband and I started to look a little crumpled, so we went looking for a replacement at our usual stops for consignment furniture, including Encore Consignment in Salem.

Adam fell in love with a couch there. It was purple and plush and probably would have taken up our entire living room. He  named it “Grimace” and was sure we’d catch it when its price dropped to 250 bucks two days later.

On the day we went to pick Grimace up, he was gone — snatched up by a lady who had arrived an hour before the store opened.

For the next few weeks, we made some sad trips to Portland, where we connived with lesser couches and were lured, however fleetingly, but the prospects of a new couch. And Adam continued to talk about the fabled purple Couch That Got Away.

A new couch! We haven’t bought anything but mattresses new… but considering the beating our old grey couch took in the four years that we had her, we began to consider the idea more and more. It would be our first major furniture purchase as a married couple.

Being stingy recyclers, we were feeling kind of torn, so we started to tell ourselves stories about why one might settle for something new.

There was that time when we pulled grey couch out of storage and found a dead mouse under a cushion…

So yes, we found a couch.  We found it on sale 55% off! — at Kuebler’s in downtown Salem. It’s a Broyhill, it’s firm and plush and perfect and supportive.

It’s the midnight parenting  these young parents needed — and it was totally worth it.

****By the way, Adam has the baby on his head because this is a proven position to combat the Dreadful Wails.***