I noticed last week that there was a dumpster in front of the house Barbara and I (and her sister Lori) used to live in, just a few blocks away from where we moved to 20 years ago. It was a small, two-bedroom place, with a tub and no shower, a basement, and a yard the size of a small mattress; wedged between another house and a car battery shop. When I mentioned I used to live there to the guy out front of the place smoking a cigarette, he told me it was going to be back on the market soon.
Barbara and I walked past it on our way to the store on Sunday, and there was an estate sale going on. We hadn’t been in the place since May of 1990, and being snoopy we went in. I went back with her to get a couple of pictures, including this one of what used to be our living room (and where I slept when I first started to come to Portland “for concerts”), and Barbara went back for an additional trip because Lori showed up that afternoon.
The house was packed to the gills with stuff, despite the fact that people were buying things at a steady clip and the sale had been going on since Friday. We looked through omething as a memento of the woman who’d lived there after us for two decades, but the only thing Barbara wanted out of the pile was this “Hagar the Horrible” strip from the window in the front door. She’s not a “Hagar” fan, but she’d put it in the window herself in 1988 and the woman who’d bought the house had left it there ever since.
