Patio Pondering: The Transition Ag Doesn’t Talk About

As I poured my coffee on the patio this morning, enjoying the cool air, a notification popped up for a new estate auction. I planned to glance at it quickly and return to my morning, but when I saw it was a farmhouse estate sale for a family friend, I kept scrolling.

There were 320 lots. That’s a mountain of things to sell. I’ve heard from the family how overwhelming it’s been—both emotionally and physically—to sort, clean, and prepare.

Scrolling through antiques, household goods, and even brand-new items never used, I felt a mix of emotions. Some pieces clearly came from generations before; others were recent purchases. The contrast struck me. This is the hard part of closing out estates from the Silent and Baby Boomer generations, especially farm estates: deciding what to save, what to sell, and what to throw in the dumpster.

Typically, farm estates are tied to long-term lives—in this case, almost 60 years in the same house. That makes it different from simply selling mom’s furniture and moving on. The weight of history hangs heavier when it’s layered into a farmhouse that held not just possessions, but a family’s entire way of life.

Having been through a smaller estate sale myself, I know how it goes. At first, you hold each item, look it over, maybe share a memory. But eventually, the piles of “keep, sell, junk” grow, and the storytelling fades. By the end you find yourself saying more often, “Why did they save this junk?” as you slogged through the detritus of your family’s life, deciding to junk things they thought were important at one time.

The emotions heirs have as they go through estates tax you mentally and physically. Seeing things from your childhood, things that helped shape you, brings back memories and experiences. Other things dredge up emotions that hurt—items that show a person’s mental demise—and you find yourself asking again and again, “Why did they buy this?” the deeper you get into “cleaning.”

In agriculture, we talk a lot about transition planning: legal documents, succession plans, dividing farms and equipment. But we never talk about dealing with the personal items, the things used every day that often had more of an impact than the land or machinery. No one prepares you for that task.

A friend texted me recently after another loss I wrote about yesterday: “Not sure how the years have gone by so fast and we are at this point in life.”

That line has stayed with me. I’m beginning the part of life where the birth of grandchildren and the passing of parents seem to overlap more often. It’s a reminder that while we can plan for the big transitions, it’s the small, ordinary things—the coffee cups, the tools, the quilts—that carry the real stories. But remembering those stories doesn’t make the work any easier. In the end, you still find yourself filling the dumpster, deciding what stays, what goes, and what gets forgotten.