Hauling Secrets

The other day we did a job in a woman’s basement. She was clearing it out in order to make room for the stuff from the rest of the house, which she planned to rent. Only thing is, the piles of stuff in the rest of the house were pretty much indistinguishable from the piles in the basement. All junk, broken and dusty. And even in the basement, she had some things tagged with stickers to go, right next to identically worthless things she wanted to stay.

This kind of thing happens all the time. A person’s selectivity seems arbitrary to us, since we cannot know what meanings they give to certain objects. Sometimes we come back later and end up taking everything in stages that are more comfortable for the person to deal with. But usually we just come and go wondering why the hell we took some things and not others.

Anyway, the whole time we were doing this job, a painted portrait was staring at us down in the cobwebby basement:

I can’t say who this person was, but I know for certain that the painting is a genuine attempt by an artist to paint a portrait of an actual person. Not a joke, or a playful rendering. An actual portrait. (I know because I saw other representations of this girl as an adult.)

We were a little bit afraid to ask too forcibly about which things stayed and went. The girl’s eyes followed us around the room to make sure we didn’t take anything we weren’t supposed to. And luckily for the sanity of guests in my living room, the painting itself stayed.