Transience

Beneath the surface is the prompt for this week's 100 Word Challenge at Julia's Place. This morning I visited an auction room where the harvests from local house clearances are displayed before going under the hammer. Antique bureaus stood beside 1970s kitchen cabinets; Victorian chaises longues beside wicker sofas. Someone's bowling kit was mixed in with a warming pan, a china doll, a fur coat and a ukelele. I'd gone in agog for a bargain and emerged chastened by a pair of bedside tables circa 1960...
The scars on the two small tables chart fifty years of married life. Now, shorn of context, they stand degraded, their plywood cheapness shown up by someone else's ornate oak wardrobe. I wince at the intimacy of the objects, exposed to the assessing eyes of strangers. To the auctioneer they are catalog numbers with a pitiful reserve price, but beneath the surface I catch poignant echoes of dismantled lives. And I realize that the treasures of my own home are made priceless only by memories and when the last of those memories have faded, they'll be flotsam worth a fiver on an auction-room floor.