Photo by Jessica Stewart / St. Joseph News-Press

Lisa Smith repairs a bed frame at her shop in south St. Joseph.

Purchase this photo

The windowless yellow brick building is as airy as a lodge when the huge double doors are swung open in the summer. Inside, the smell of thousands of objects spill out of cardboard boxes and items propped against walls.

These are other people’s possessions — remnants from people who hit hard financial times, died, were forgotten about or no longer care about their property. So much of it ends up here — Yesterday’s Treasures on King Hill Avenue — for a second chance at life.

Through auctions and estate sales, the store’s owner, Lisa Smith, buys, sifts through and resells parts of other people’s lives.

A self-proclaimed pack rat and business-minded woman, the potent mix has given her an inventory over the years that has included the folded American flag of a solider killed in Iraq, diaries belonging to gushy teenage girls and a person’s cremated remains.

*****

The winding paths through boxes are a maze. Walking with the store’s owner, you could assume she knows where she is going, but even she is not sure.

This is a former electrical warehouse, a building on St. Joseph’s South Side that Ms. Smith bought on the cheap five years ago.

The basement is storage and is where new merchandise arrives each week and is triaged before moving upstairs to be sold. It is a gritty, cavernous place in which you feel the urge to spit every so often to keep the dirt from settling in your mouth.

Ms. Smith moves a baby Moses basket filled with ebony baby dolls aside. She lifts a cardboard box onto a bamboo suitcase, and begins digging.

“This is going to be a whole lot of nothing,” she says, immediately recognizing mediocrity.

The top of the box contains half-used shampoos and dish soaps. “I hardly buy anything. I’ll use these.”

Digging further, she finds ornaments, decorations, trinkets. “My family, this is pretty much what they get for Christmas,” she says.

*****

Each week, Ms. Smith drives her 20-foot box truck to estate sales and auctions. There, she fills the truck full with unknown boxes (the overflow is the backseat of her white Lincoln Town Car).

Photo by Jessica Stewart / St. Joseph News-Press

Lisa Smith, left, owner of Yesterday's Treasures, helps customer Charlene Pfleiderer out to her car Wednesday afternoon. Ms. Pfleiderer is a regular customer and sometimes just comes by to visit with Ms. Smith.

Purchase this photo

Since she bids on lots blindly, she never knows what she’s bought until she’s back at the store, digging. That mystery is why she, and she alone, goes through the boxes.

Over the years, she has found drug paraphernalia, parole papers, an entire case for a search warrant on a drug house and people’s homemade unmentionables.

“You usually find Bibles along with that stuff,” she said.

She once found a .38 special handgun. Police later verified it hadn’t been used in a crime.

“There’s not much that I haven’t found. I’ve seen it all,” Ms. Smith says.

Even walking through basement storage, curious gems are littered about on the floor, in boxes.

In one corner, there is an unscratched lottery ticket. Steps away, a Polaroid of a woman’s swollen foot. There are expired bank cards, dusty checkbooks, unopened bills, football trophies and family albums.

“I find everything. Good thing I’m an honest person,” Ms. Smith said.

The items talk. And for a person willing to listen, there are stories being told.

*****

Spread out in four boxes, a 50-something woman’s possessions include a rose-colored diary, in which she writes her daily fears.

She’s afraid her teenage daughter isn’t happy. She’s afraid she will lose her job. She’s afraid her husband is cheating on her. In fact, she’s certain of that (he’s been spending a lot of time at the riverboat).

The entries abruptly end in March 2006, when she writes that her husband came home after being gone for three days, claiming to have given a couple a ride to Texas.

Then there is the exaggerated striped suit, custom tailored no doubt for a giant.

Another box is full of insurance papers, including a mother’s letter presumably to her attorney saying she suspects her child is dealing drugs from her home. She is curious whether her home can be seized in a police raid. “The house is mortgaged to the hilt ...,” the woman writes in large cursive.

A few cardboard boxes away, in a box full of sundries, a fourth-grader’s letter to a fireman is dated Oct. 30, 1984: “Thank you for visiting our classroom and helping us learn about fire safety.”

In the same box, the boy’s teacher at Neely Elementary School writes a concerned letter to the boy’s mother about his difficulty grasping subtraction: “He would benefit from extra work at home,” the teacher writes.

*****

Like so many people who lost their belongings, — evidenced in mounting bills, glum diary entries and upset faces on Polaroid shots — Ms. Smith has her own difficult past.

At 23, she became a stepgrandmother, marrying Ronnie Wilson, a man 24 years her senior. By then, she already had a child and was divorced. She made a happy life with Mr. Wilson, who was older than her father. When he died, she was devastated.

Eventually she married again, and that ended in a divorce last year. She got the store in the settlement.

Her ex-husband, she says, bought too much, and she now has a burdensome inventory. This summer, she will throw open the basement doors for $1 Saturdays.

Broken jewelry, toys, romance novels, movies — all a buck.

Ms. Smith, for a woman whose life is in someone else’s possessions, says she hasn’t done too bad for herself. Shoveling through the rubble most days, she picks out old things and gives them a new life with each sale.

“This was my dream,” Ms. Smith said. “to have a store this big ... to sell.”

Ahmad Safi can be reached at ahmadsafi@npgco.com.