There's a certain pattern to a mom's life, and in these homes of women who have passed on, you see the evidence of it.

There are the piles of scrapbooks, letters, photos, and correspondence of intimate connections. The trail begins with cards, notes, and photos with written clues to romance. Perhaps there are diaries. Soon there are stacks of 'baby books', family photo albums, depositories of greeting cards, postcards, letters and other clues of family and social attachments. If there were diaries before, they cease now -- a mother journals her family's life; she is too busy to pay attention to, let alone journal, her own.

As the children get older, these scrapbooks turn into group things. Work newsletters, bowling league gazettes, church group & luncheon publications... She continues her habits of saving and pasting. As the children age, she becomes an empty-nester, and the social group activities are intermittently interrupted with family wedding invitations, announcements of new born babies, thank you for the gift' cards, and a few obituaries here and there. Some of the wealthier women traveled, and you'll find volumes full of travel itineraries, plane & boat tickets, postcards, photographs and other travel souvenirs. But just as the books became less and less about family, so the books eventually become less and less about the living.

To soon the scrapbooks become filled with page after page of obituaries, memorial service bulletins, the occasional thank you card from the younger generation for the flowers... Even if the obits are punctuated with the occasional wedding and birth announcement clippings, there are no cards, or handwritten notes, just newspaper clippings. Proof that human interaction is limited, the only handwritting now is the feathery-script of the woman making the book as she wrote the date below the clipping. The scrapbook is a one-woman -- one-way -- endeavor. She continues to chronicle the past rather than the now. To fill her day as well as the books, she includes newspaper articles on 'Remember When' and '50 Years Ago Today' stories. These clippings dot the obits with more socially-sterile tanned documents of death and loss...

There you stand, holding these books, this evidence of life which was cut, pasted and collected by this woman who has passed on. And when you bring the stacks to the living, they say "Go ahead and sell it. Or pitch it if it's not worth anything; I don't want it."

I cringe when they say that. But I do as I am told. I know that someone will come along and adopt these books, these women & their families, and learn all about their lives...

An excerpt from Estate Sales and Women's Lives, a racier piece of mine published at Sex-Kitten.net (adults only!)