The Pickers

March 16, 2026

Greetings from the fragments,

My neighbor said, “I think I may have to give up driving.”  We were standing in his kitchen, talking about his car in the driveway, nearly flattened from crashing into a deer.  It was a poignant conversation, a teetering place in the man’s life.  I offered to help, thinking I actually might. But I was too late.

Sunday night and early Monday mornings, the Pickers come by. Often you can hear them as they come down the street, clanking and clunking, loud exhaust, growling engines.  They drive old trucks, the beds framed in ramshackle plywood so the treasures can be piled high above the cab.

We stood in the kitchen, and I wrote my phone number, which he will never use. He tells me he stopped collecting things, in fact had sold much of what he’d kept in the house.  He waved vaguely at the huge rooms around us.  I’d never been inside, so I don’t know what’s missing.

There was no obvious sign of his final decision, he simply wasn’t at the house anymore. Neither of us knew that we’d had our last conversation.  Maybe a month later his family arrived to begin taking things from his house. A mattress, a mirror, some boxes.

Sometimes the Pickers pull trailers. These are patched together affairs, sometimes the back end of some other truck, sheared from the cab, an orphan put to work.  The trailers have ropes and straps holding the flotsam in place.  The load bounces and heaves behind the truck, rattling and creaking, perhaps a protest about the next destination.

In the back there are washing machines and fence posts and old hoses. There are broken trampolines and rusted tricycles and chain-link from something.  Abandoned at curbs, dumped in empty lots, hauled to the driveway for the garbage truck on Monday. 

Other than the minutes in the kitchen, the only time I spoke with my neighbor was at Halloween, when I would bring up the tail of my parade of children. Otherwise, I knew him from waving, or from seeing his life framed in my picture window.  He was collector of things, interesting objects he would find at estate sales, at auctions, in tents, in garages.  He would haul these treasures home, pinball machines, old street signs, furniture.  Glass, metal, wood, from other lives, other times.  He was a tinkerer.  He would fix the broken hinge and polish the scratch and weld something and make the things better, and some things he kept but much of it he sold to other collectors.

The Pickers idle at the end of the driveway, the truck’s engine coughing a dark plume, and they poke and probe the jetsam, looking for metal to sell, or lawn mowers to be fixed, or things whose future I cannot imagine.  It is remarkable what they take and what they leave.

Some old toys are left out all winter and they are rusted or broken or simply not good enough.  Some things are worn out, others like new but broken or outdated.  They sit in purgatory for a while but eventually someone cracks the gavel and, the night before garbage collection, gets dragged to the curb with the recycling and the bin that holds the trash bags. 

My neighbor was in his eighties, had an impressive head of white hair, and an easy smile.  He had a quiet demeanor, seemed content, which also could have been something else.  He told me that he had ‘immaculate generation’. When I wrote out my name on the paper with my phone number, in large block letters, he looked at it and admitted he thought I was someone else.  I’ve lived next to him for thirty years.

In our yard the racoons scurry from the trees across the yard, we are not consulted on their mission.  Crows litter the trees, arguing about issues that we are indifferent about.  Coyotes bay in the night celebrating some find none of us envision. Over the field a mile away I can see a host of buzzards circling. It’s their favored place, for reasons I don’t want to think about. Whatever they are up to, it’s easy to not notice, unless they are in your garbage or pecking at some carcass on the side of the road. It goes on in every day and I’m comfortable ignoring it. Mostly.

A professional came and held an estate sale, and for a couple days the neighborhood was so crowded with cars we could hardly maneuver down the street to get to the grocery store, or to Target to buy more things.  There was a near constant stream of things carried out of my neighbor’s house.  It seemed impossible, like some version of a clown car, but with his possessions. It would be impossible to trace the lineage of these things, from one collector to another to another, each time the piece wavering in value, changing in the delight it gives.

When it was over, the family held a garage sale, a tepid echo of the previous effort.  A few more cars, a few more things hauled out.  Then the home-made sign was taken down and the garage swept out, bags of the unsalvageable heaved at the end of the drive.  Someone dragged a broken wheelbarrow to the curb, and some scraps of trim, and an old vending machine, big enough to live in.

And then, the Pickers came.

Hope this finds you looking at your collection,

David

Copyright © 2026 David Smith