something eternal smiles and the irises outlast us all (photos)
I don’t like estate sales.
The air in those places always tastes a little off. Too many ghosts hanging too close to the ceiling. Too many strangers pawing through relics of a life that used to be. You can feel them—buzzards in sneakers, breath fogging over glass cabinets, eyes flicking, calculating. The scent of human memory being priced out by the ounce.
It feels predatory.
Like someone cracked open the tomb of a lesser pharaoh and started haggling over the crockery.
My wife and I don't really care about bargains or resealing or worshiping at consumerist altars, No. We are seeking artifacts.
We seek out the resonant—tools still humming from use, a pot still stained from a hundred forgotten meals. Not what a thing is worth, but what it meant. Continuity. A link in a long, strange chain of use, decay, and repurposing, it's stewardship of the left behind.
Last year we ended up at a sale deep in the Wisconsin farmland. Quiet house. A few outbuildings slouching under the weight of old snow and older memory. Ranch-style home outside, but a fractal of hallways and doors that shouldn’t be where they were. Like the architecture was fighting back.
The inside was hollow. Something about it rang false. A dead shell. The soul of the place was outside.
A tool shed, precise and clean. A barn housing antique tractors that shouldn't still work, but absolutely did. Machines older than me. Maybe older than my father. Still obedient to the key.
That’s where we found it. A glint of metal near the shed caught my wife’s eye. Half-buried in weeds. Trellising, she said. I wasn’t sure. But I like strange metal in strange dirt, and I like a good excuse to wade into the wilds.
We pushed through overgrowth and found a memory. An echo of a garden. Long neglected. Overrun. Familiar in the way haunted things sometimes are.
We’d seen this before. Our own land was once like this—a tangled orchard barely holding onto itself. We reclaimed it, inch by inch, with patience and stubbornness and the kind of quiet lunacy gardening requires.
So we dug.
We used the shed’s own tools—shovels that gleamed with unnatural longevity. Better than mine. Older than mine. Possibly smarter. I keep mine clean. I sharpen them. But they never quite shine like these. These were older than me, and looked like they’d outlast me by decades.
And buried in that soil, we found treasure.
Dozens of heirloom plants—iris, lily, hyacinth, allium—botanical whispers from another century. The bulbs were massive, gnarled, alien in their resilience. Like they’d seen things. Known things.
We paid five dollars for the lot.
It felt like robbery.
It felt like a pact.
We brought them home. Planted them in soil we’d already won back from the weeds. Waited.
This week, they bloomed.
And in that bloom was a reminder: nature persists.
You tend a garden, you encourage growth, and the plants thrive. They don’t ask for much. Just time. Patience. Care. And in return, they offer beauty that outlives you.
That’s the part no one tells you about gardening You’re not in charge.
You’re just a temporary custodian of an ancient, ultimately indifferent process.
You pull weeds. You turn soil. You participate.
Plants persist.
Through drought. Through frost. Through grief. Through generations.
The irises now live among our others—century-old cultivars passed down from house to house, woman to woman, place to place. My wife got hers from her mother. Her mother got them from La Crosse. From Albert Lea. From ancestral homes whose roofs have long since collapsed into the earth. Roots outlasting rafters.
How old are these flowers? We don’t know.
What lives have they seen? We don’t ask.
We simply tend. We hope the next people do the same.
Because the flowers will remain.
Long after this house is quiet.
Long after our names are forgotten.
They’ll bloom. Again and again.
And somewhere beneath the surface of it all, something eternal will smile.