Penny, Part 2

Cash, questions and quirks.

“We’re on a treasure hunt,” Bob, my husband and business partner, said to our four-woman crew. Family photos, valuable artwork, fine jewelry and ballerina knick-knacks were to be kept. Trash haulers take everything else.

We’d just signed a new client (please read Penny, Part 1 if you haven’t already) and now had two weeks to dig through a 4,000 square-foot home piled five-feet deep with garbage.

I began to see how our client Penny* lived day-to-day in this hellish home. There was a “chute” smooshed into the garbage on the stairwell. I imagined 96-year-old Penny making her nighttime belly-crawl up and then, in the morning, sliding back down the stairs. Curious, I scaled Penny’s trail myself. It took me up the stairway and into a back bedroom. Not the master bedroom, I noted. Interesting. That back bedroom had a nest of sorts carved into a pile of circa-1980 clothing, most of it still with tags. There were food wrappers, looking very recent, mixed into the edge. Mail from last month, unopened, was pulled into this little den of respite as well.

My dirty gloved hand covered my mouth as I gasped. My God. How does this happen? I needed to know.

I also needed to meet Penny. If I was to truly serve her, I needed to sit with her. The project was in good hands with Bob and our team, so I snuck off to Penny’s new Memory Care apartment just five minutes away.

Soon sat face-to-face with Penny. She was lovely, still. Coral blush settled in to her crinkly wrinkles and her freshly dyed black hair curled around her ears. Pearl earrings peaked out to say hello.

“Who are you?” she asked me for the third time in five minutes. I didn’t mind.

“I’m a friend of your son Anthony’s and my name is Anne Marie. Anthony asked me to bring photos and ballerina figurines from your house. I’d love to learn more. Can you tell me a bit about your favorite ballerinas?” I said, hoping it was all open-ended enough to spark a conversation.

“My mother gives me a new Dresden ballerina each year for my birthday,” Penny said. I noticed she spoke in the present tense. No worries, I’ll play.

“How wonderful! Do you recall where you display them? I’d love to bring them to you!” I said.

“Mother always puts them in the cabinet in the dining room, the one with the velvet backing,” Penny said, her voice lilting. “You must take great care as the costumes look like lace but are really porcelain. Very, very delicate.”

“They sound so pretty- I can’t wait to see them! I’ll look in your dining room,” I told her.

“Thank you! Please come again and when you do, bring the Dresden ballerinas. They are in the dining room,” Penny said.

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Back at Penny’s house, the team unearthed several large portraits of Penny in her younger days. She was beautiful. Itty-bitty with big, dark, eyes. Ballerina portraits and school photos all showed off her lofty cheekbones and full lips. I gleaned from notes jotted on the backs of photos she was originally from the east coast and danced ballet in New York City in the 1940s.

How did Penny go from being a Manhattan dancer to a hoarder sleeping in a bed of cracker wrappers in the suburban Midwest? What the hell transpired over the past 75 years? This mystery chewed at me and I so wanted to dig the answer out from under this mountain of garbage.

During one of our phone calls, Anthony* said Penny had been a “collector” his entire life and that she stuffed the spare bedrooms and basement of the home with clothes, knick-knacks and paper when he was a child. “My dad, like a lot of men of his generation, was pretty domineering. After he died, I guess, she just took over. I stayed for a few days after his funeral but have not slept there since. If I come back, I get a hotel, and we visit there. There’s no discussing her collecting with her, and I cannot stand being in that house,” he said.

I asked Anthony about his mom’s happiest times so I could get a sense of what photos to bring to her new apartment. “I have to say her ballerina days, before she was married and before my brother or I was born. She always said she loved dancing on stage. She loved the music, the makeup, the costumes. Being a mother and a wife was not her thing.” Anthony gave an awkward chuckle. It’s like she connected with her audience but never with her family.

That first day of digging through the hoard rewarded us with a sizable pile of potential photos to bring to Penny. We had a stack of snapshots of ballet practice and four oil portraits in gilded frames. Truly, I had never known anyone with that many pictures of themself. It was odd. But we’d found no Dresden ballerinas yet.

We did find one thing in droves we were not expecting: Cash. Lots of it. In dry-rotted envelopes taped to the bottom of the sofa, in dusty glass jars tucked in the back of a curio cabinet, stuffed under chair cushions. That first day at Penny’s house, we piled up $11,000, mostly in $1, $5 and $10 bills. There were also coins strewn throughout the hoard. So many coins that Bob started shoveling them into a five-gallon bucket. To accomplish the feat of having a 2015 quarter nestled among mail from 1985- that was feet-deep into the hoard- Penny must have stood in the living room entryway and thrown the coins. Many, many times. So odd.

After a long and dirty day swimming in Penny’s madness, all I was able to learn was: Penny struggled to love, she was passive-aggressive with cash and she only found joy in her long-ago lifetime. I sensed, of course, she was unhappily married, but no solid proof- yet. That was next.

*Client names and key details changed to protect their privacy.

Look for Penny, Part 3 next week!