The Grandma Goods Distribution System
Take what you can.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.
I love estate sales. Preventing waste and getting cool shit for a dollar and a half are two things that matter to me very much. In New Orleans, where I live, antique stores are overpriced and for tourists, while thrift stores are much more about function than form. Thus, if you want to go dig through crap to find treasure, you go to estate sales, my friend. Yes you do.
My brain volleys between excitement and melancholy at estate sales, I can marvel at someone’s Tupperware collection one moment and feel deeply sad that it will never hold their most famous recipe again in the next. The most overwhelming feelings are reserved for moments when I find something my grandmother used to own. As I fork over five bucks for a trinket tray or an ancient cocktail pitcher, I can almost hear how furious she is that I’m paying money for something she’d have given me for free. But there’s an indestructible truth to being a grandchild, particularly a beloved one: when it’s time to take our grandmother’s things, things are the very last thing on our minds.