5/2/21

Tony: Another Woman’s Treasure

Tanglewood Drive, White River Junction, VT

The drive from Hanover to Tanglewood Drive in White River Junction was eclectic, almost ominous. The garage sale didn’t specify address – the advertisement on Facebook only  provided the street name. I typed this into my phone and while I waited for it to generate my route, I hoped Tanglewood Drive wasn’t too long.

I spent five minutes on the freeway before taking an exit to drive on suburban Vermont roads, past two kinds of houses: those with yards marked off by garden beds with lines of brown mulch speckled with green seedlings, and others marked by wet, matted autumn leaves, the result of being left alone, never picked up and packed by the winter’s snowfall, currently decomposing in dewy tickets of weeds. Some lawns featured tractors, or some other piece of farm machinery and Ford flatbed trucks, which became more frequent as I drove along. Soon the houses disappeared.

My car straddled the river to my left, and railroad tracks to my right, as I passed by a sign greeting me to Hartford. Just as quickly as I passed it, the sign marking the town’s border  flew by my window again. I had entered and left as quickly as the town had thrived in its prime. Too quick to take a good look at the abandoned shops, dilapidated concrete rubble of deserted factories and window-shops, and afterthoughts that had seen livelier days. I had the feeling I was almost at my destination, but my phone said I was only halfway there.

I passed a scramble of stones and a large wooden pole; a sign which wrote: Caution. Entering Bettisville. Population: 15. Among the rocks sat a white stuffed bear and a Trump / Pence campaign sign tucked between the stone slabs. I exited this town-within-a-town, dubious of its owner, who, I believe, lived next door. He was riding a tractor over his side lawn, which was littered with political signs and threats. I drove on.

Under beam bridges, I passed the sign marking a disastrous train wreck. It said: At 2:10 AM on February 5, 1887, the last car of the Montreal Express derailed causing three cars to fall from the bridge and crash on the Ice of the White River 43 feet below. I drove under. Embers from the coal stoves ignited the spilled oil of the lanterns and fire consumed the wreckage. Twenty-five passengers and 5 crew members perished. I felt a shiver. I drove on cautiously.  

Luckily someone had put up cardboard signs on Tanglewood Drive, indicating the address of the garage sale. 195. I drove to what felt like the end of the road, reaching the house with the open garage. It was a garden bed house. But it also had matted leaves sticking out from overgrown bushes and the unpaved dirt driveway was muddy and bumpy from pools of rain. I noticed an old swing set on the side of the house, evidently long into disuse. Four cars were parked on the grass along the side of the driveway in what was a make-shift parking lot. I parked by the Ford flatbed.

The first thing I saw when I walked to the garage was a large, white clay dove, about the size of a meter stick. “Is that a garden gnome?” I asked. The man who was leading the yard sale turned to me.

“No. You know those merry go rounds that Mormons use?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, there are these little displays that they make, like with a boat. This goes on the boat.”

The dove was hand-sculpted in white clay. The sculptor was a balding tall man with a wide stature, fair skinned and fair-featured in light washed jeans and a green hoodie from Billings Farm in Woodstock. The man introduced himself to me as Tony.

I didn’t look at his feet, but he was probably wearing running shoes, or no shoes at all. And a baseball cap which he periodically removed as he spoke to run his hand over his scalp, remnants of a buzz cut of pin-straight strawberry blonde hair that was mostly gone. He rubbed his hand over and over, as if not long ago there was lots of hair there.

The garage smelled strongly of weed, which grew stronger as I walked in to observe the items. An older couple entered and glanced at the items on display, before walking out. I stepped aside to listen.

“I wanted to stop by,” the man said. “I used to live in the neighborhood.” They exchanged glances.

“Johnny?!”

“Yeah, yeah!” They were both bewildered. They knew each other from somewhere, maybe they were coworkers at some point.

“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I remembered your name, being the old stoner I am,” Tony said.

I kept looking at the foldable tables as they talked. Everything out was for sale: old wooden signs with live, laugh love, or home is where the heart is, cardboard boxes full of onesies, a rack of children’s clothes, old skis and helmets, an old Jack Daniels’ Tennessee Whiskey Bottle, in fact, glass bottles of varying shapes and sizes, and of various previous uses, electric kettles and tea pots, a full sized refrigerator, various hats — baseball caps from fairs or events long ago, even an original Stetson cowboy hat. I picked it up and admired it.

“I’m not a hoarder. I’m a keeper of objects with sentimental value, there’s a difference,” Tony said.

Sitting nearby the cowboy hat were a set of porcelain bowls, painted with brightly magenta, orange, yellow and green stripes that reminded me of summer at my grandparents’ house, and of sunflowers. I inspected each one and picked two which didn’t have any chips or cracks. One for me, and one for my sister. They would be first two dishes we owned for our apartment this summer. The first time we’d be living away from home in our very own place. The bowls in my hand gave me nostalgia for the future. They reminded me of river swims and hot breakfast cereal with my sister, and spaghetti dinner dates in the evenings.

Tony told me that he came to Dartmouth this winter to teach the kids how to sculpt with snow for the Winter Carnival. He’s a professional snow sculptor.

The theme for the carnival was video games — old fashioned arcade style games, that is. Pac Man, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders. The kids knew nothing about them, Tony says. They were in over their heads in more ways than one. The blocks of compacted snow measured eight cubic feet and it was a challenge to teach them howe to whittle away at the blocks to achieve their desired sculpture. It was a reductive technique, Tony says.

He pulls another large white clay figure from the top of a filing cabinet nearby – it’s a Triceratops head with horns and scales etched in exquisite detail. He’s making it for a daycare facility – the owner wants a dinosaur head mounted over the toilet in the bathroom. Tony thought that sounded amazing. He said he would paint it eventually, but he’s color blind. So he has to paint it all in one sitting, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to mix paints to match the pigments when he returned.

I asked if he was a professional sculptor, realizing he had already told me the answer.

“Yes and no. I work in the restaurant industry by trade, but I’m a sculptor by choice. Trying to make it full time. I’ve been fed up by the restaurant business even before the pandemic.”

Tony had a neighbor who was really into snow sculpting, and for the longest time it eluded him. But he decided to try one day. Then his sculpting team went to the snow sculpting national championship and they won. He’s gotten a lot of interest after that – commissions that have sustained his business. Now he was trying to make his part time hobby a full-time job.

A minivan pulled into the driveway. A small woman with long dark hair walked out. She sat down in a chair and mumbled to a girl who I assumed was Tony’s daughter, a middle schooler with three different colors in her bleached hair.

Tony tells people he’s from Brownsville, but he’s actually from a small town called Reading. He grew up right by Jenne Farm, one of the most photographed farms in America, now in disarray, but it still has its charm during autumn. “When you drive up and the red barn peeks out over the crest of the hill, the foliage touches the lush green grass” it’s gorgeous, according to Tony.

I told him that when I visited, a bunch of unfriendly men smoking cigarettes shook their heads at me. We turned the car around.

“Yeah, they’re mountain men,” Tony says with a chuckle. Tony grew up with the mountain men. They would scold him and make him do chores; paint the shutters, help with woodwork, things like that. Chores in exchange for hard cider. He seemed proud.

“How much for the bowls?” Tony turned to the dark-haired woman.

“Two dollars for the whole set,” she said.

The dark-haired woman, who I learned was Tony’s wife, told me that the bowls were over ten years old. Her name was Maureen.

“Those bowls are special because they belonged to an amazing person,” Tony said. They belonged to Maureen’s mother, who had passed away two summers ago.

“You know she loved to play video games,” Tony was looking at Maureen. “She’d play with anyone and everyone who came into the house.” Tony then looked at me. “She had boxes of cords and wires and old consoles. This guy asked if he could buy it, and at first, I wasn’t sure, I was like ‘I’d better ask Maureen first.’ But I sold it to him anyway.”

Maureen jumped in. “And I’m happy he did, because I wouldn’t have been able to do that.”

“It’s better now that it’s in someone’s hands who will put it to good use,” Tony added.

“Mom would be happy.”

When her mother died, Maureen was in the process of moving out of her own home into this one, and at the same time she was also moving her mom’s belongings out of her house and into storage. She still has boxes she has yet to unpack.

 

They didn’t accept card, or Venmo, so I stood in the garage and downloaded Paypal. Tony apologized for being old-fashioned. I sent two dollars to the account linked to his email. “My payment confirmation said I paid someone named Abigail Perham?”

“Oh that’s my ex.” Tony said matter-of-factly. They had linked accounts or at least, they used to. The girl with the colored hair scoffed. They wondered if Abigail would be notified, if she’d wonder why she was getting money sent to her through her ex-husband’s account.

I laughed. Tony laughed. Maureen laughed. We all laughed, even the girl with the multicolored hair. I was about to say that I get it. I understand the tension. Even with these strangers. Between someone who used to be part of a family, who was now estranged. Transcending through something they used to share. An object of past memories. Gone but still connected. But I didn’t need to say anything. We laughed.

They made it fourteen years, Tony and his ex-wife. Which is pretty long for a relationship these days, Tony told me. He said people think new things might not work out a lot of the time, referring to him and Maureen. “But I say one woman’s trash is another woman’s treasure.” We laughed again. I felt in.