the mailbox lady was quite old; she lived alone in a grey house just down the street from my parents’ place.  when i still lived with my parents, we would stand at our kitchen window and watch her hobble down the driveway to check the mail.  as she’d make her way back up the driveway in her bathrobe, my dad and i would make tasteless jokes about what would happen if she were to fall.  we never met her or talked to her or even waved at her from the yard; she was just the mailbox lady.

as i crossed the bridge and rounded the golf course corner on the way to my parents’ house today, i thought at first that there was a garage sale.  a dozen cars lined the street in front of the mailbox lady’s house, and people were walking up and down her driveway.  but the garage door was closed, and the orange posterboard signs out front read, “estate sale.”

“so, i guess the mailbox lady kicked it, eh?” i said to my dad as we walked to her house.  he had asked me if i wanted to go with him to look for bookshelves at the estate sale, and i did.  so off we went down the street and up the same driveway we’d seen for years.  inside, people were browsing through the rooms as though her house were a department store–opening her drawers, rifling through her closet, examining her toiletries.  everything she owned was for sale, including her wheelchair, the food from her kitchen, and a whole sheaf of pamphlets on student travel from 1956.  feeling out of place among the middle-aged helmet-hair women, i stuck close to my dad, idly looking at things in whatever room he was measuring bookshelves.

in the garage she had several stacks of calculus and biology textbooks, wrapped in brown paper.  next to those were seventeen boxes full of splashy trade paperbacks, with titles like a wedding to remember, secret ecstasy, love surrendered.  a refrigerator in her bathroom.  seven containers of antacid in her pantry.  “world’s best” magnets on her fridge.  harry belafonte records.  andy williams.  bridge-size playing cards.  sweaters.  evening gloves.  all her grandmotherly-smelling belongings neatly arranged as if on display in an antiques store, each one with a masking-tape price tag attached.

the mailbox lady had posessions.  and a life.  she was three-dimensional.  who knew?