I was wandering among piles and stacks of someone else’s junk yesterday. Some people call it picking. Some call it antiquing. I mostly just call it looking at stuff that other people didn’t want until someone came along and put a price tag on it so that everyone would want it, whereupon some new owner would take it home and add it to their pile of stuff they don’t need.

Too cynical?

Okay. Tell me, who needs a marble toilet the size of a small John Deere tractor?

I rest my case.

Here’s how it works. Right now, all over America, there are people sorting through the stuff that belonged to their parents and grandparents. There are chairs and old baskets and toys in the attic. Grandpa ran a general store, which is where the old scales in the basement came from. The dust on it is as thick as icing on a cake. Out in the barn there’s a rusted hand crank drill, a block plane, and an old mule harness. In the closet, stacks of vinyl with pictures of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra on the cardboard covers.

The wife says, “What are we going to do with all this stuff?”

It’s August and the sweat is dripping although it’s only 8:00 in the morning. He’s got one hand on his hip and he’s wiping his brow with his shop rag with the other.

“I say we get a roll-off dumpster in here and load it up.”

That sounds practical, but the idea of tossing this stuff feels like it would be disrespectful to everything she holds dear in this life. She picks up and holds an album cover admiring the picture of Andy Williams.

“I remember listening to Moon River when I was a child. Mama would play music while she did housework on Saturday mornings.”

“You have Spotify on your phone. You can still listen to Moon River.”

The thing is, we belong to our stuff maybe more than our stuff belongs to us. It’s hard to throw away your memories. But when the stuff of generations past becomes your stuff you reach a point where your love of stuff is put to the test.

If you keep it you’ve gotta have a place for it. And that place usually becomes a pile in the corner of the basement, or it goes in the storage shed. Maybe it goes up on a shelf that is already sagging with your own stuff that you don’t use. A few things become a part of the décor in the living room or kitchen.

He offers a compromise. “Pick a few things you really want to keep. The rest of it we could get rid of in a yard sale. There are lots of people out there looking for stuff like this.”

But a yard sale is work and they both know that will probably never happen.

Enter the Estate Sale consultant.

This is the socially acceptable option for clearing out one’s stuff. The consultant is excited to see your stuff. She gets a cut of the sale, but hey, it’s not about the money. It’s about watching total strangers rifle through the plates and bowls and glasses of your childhood. VHS cassettes of John Wayne movies. Coffee cans of old nails and screws. Old bed frames that haven’t been used since Herman Talmadge was in office. Prince Albert tobacco tins. Broken garden rakes. Glass doorknobs. A wooden bowl shaped like a fish.

The process is painful for anyone with even half a heart.

But this is how little shops in little towns exist. They have names like High Cotton, The Resurrection Store, and Great Expectations Warehouse. You walk through and touch a chair that used to sit by someone’s fireplace. A mother once sat there and held a sick child at two in the morning. On a shelf there’s a cast iron cornbread mold that once came out of an oven, butter sizzling against the hot pan as it melted on its way to the kitchen table. Leaning in the corner there’s an old window through which a child watched the rain wash away his dreams of playing ball in the backyard.

I feel like I’m walking through a very personal journey here. I have no idea who these people were, but I imagine their story. They didn’t live magical lives, just ordinary ones. Who was it that got tucked into bed under that quilt? What was he building when he used that saw? Was he sitting in a rocker on the front porch when he smoked that pipe?

What were they thinking when they installed that marble toilet with gold-plated pins for the seat?

I’m glad this stuff is not in a landfill somewhere. Even though I didn’t buy any of it, I am glad it all has a second chance to find a new place in this world. I think the attraction of wandering through the narrow aisles and holding a piece of someone else’s life is that the touch and smell of it all makes old forgotten memories live again.

From where I’m sitting right now, I can see the lamp I made from an old wagon wheel hub that once belonged to my Uncle Clem. He farmed with my ancestors in the early decades of the last century. I rode one of his mules when I was a small child. But thirty years from now that lamp will not matter to anyone living.

It makes me wonder about what will happen to all my stuff. One day, everything I own will be old, maybe even antique. Some of it already is. Most of my life and the things in it will be forgotten.

Or maybe my stuff will get a second chance.

Today is the second anniversary of Beth’s passing. I am walking down the narrow aisles of my memories and I am grateful for all the stuff of our life together. Stuff that may one day end up in the corner of a small shop in a small town with a price tag hanging by a cotton thread. But mostly I am grateful for the fact that she had a lot to do with the making of who I am.

I still don’t know why she’s gone. The “why” questions are the most complicated. But I do know that God is giving me a second chance at life. My place and my purpose in this world are not over. Life cannot be put on hold. The sun still rises and I do not intend to sit in some dusty corner and let living pass me by.

I will go by the cemetery later today. Not to remember her death, but to reassure her that I am living. To tell her thank you, and to remind myself that life is full of hope. That His mercies are new every day.

It was hot as I walked around these little shops. Sweat running down the small of my back. Fans blowing stale air. But I’m glad that I came here. It reminded me of something I hope I never forget.

That I believe in second chances.