There was a simple beauty to the way the thin layer of ice had formed crystals on items set up on the back lot at the auction house. As I strode through the assemblage of stuff, I stopped every so often to just take them in.
The gentle rays of the sun was cutting across the field, but not with enough heat to melt the tiny formations.
Two lamps had been left out in the field, the overnight moisture covering them like a thin layer of transparent paint. (I’d be much too afraid to plug them into any outlet.) A set of opaque bowls and a circular towel holder had turned a soft white. On an outside ledge near where furniture was stored on a roofed ramp, two antique desks were coated with frost.
The most ironic item was an ice machine on whose surface nature had made its own ice.
Seeing items left outside at an auction house was nothing new for me. They have so much stuff to sell that some of it – not the good stuff, though – ends up outside and uncovered in all kinds of weather. It gets snowed on, rained on or faded under a hot summer sun. Years ago, I went to an auction where boxes and boxes of women’s shoes had been left out in the rain and were soaked.
One of my regular auction houses solved the problem by constructing a metal building to hold its furniture; in the past, the furniture was stored in a roofed building with no sides. Its box-lot items are covered with a roof.
Even the auction house with the iced items covers a small space on the back lot, a makeshift enclosure that on this day held only a few boxes. On the ground was a large puddle of water along one aisle.
Many of the items not covered were likely useable once the midday sun had melted the ice or the new owner had wiped it away (yes, all would be sold).
Here’s what some of them looked like:
