I can see the tin roofed barn tightly packed, straw on the floor. It's raining, the trees are heavy with rain on the outside. It smells like sawdust. It's a place in a small town. It's a place in the northwest, where I've never been. Older, wider women: mothers watch the auctioneer. They wait for those items, the ones they can't live without. Their children fly in and out between the chairs of women. The smell of wet barns will be their past. It will never be like this again.