6:36 p.m. Tomorrow we're going to a charity auction and Igor himself is on the block. Sort of. A book he's co-authored, the Star Trek Cookbook, is one of the items up for bid. Ethan Phillips, who plays the friendly alien chef Neelix on Voyager, is the star attraction. My Igor is a mere pale satellite and I am going to take some photos for my little web page.

But it got me to thinking about other auctions we have attended in the past. We are insanely crrraaaaaaazy when it comes to auctions. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if we bid for our own book -- silent or gavel-pounding, country-barn or Butterfield's showroom -- if people are bidding, my heart starts pounding and Igor's hand goes up. We are totally incorrigible.

The chair that I love so much? We got it at an auction. It was all curled up upon itself because the whole ladder back section is adjustable when you have a dowel or metal rod strung across. Without the dowel, the back folds down into the seat and the chair looks all squashed and broken and so we got it for just a few dollars.

The items in the pretty picture? All sold at an auction, I'm sorry to say. Pretty picture, eh? That was once my living room, when we lived in New Jersey. The picture itself is from a big wallpaper book, but the room and the furniture (except for the mantle clock) were mine. The wallpaper people came and knocked on the big front door and said they'd wallpaper a room for free if we let them photograph the results.

They wallpapered the living room in this soft floral paper which was, unfortunately, not silk but just mere shiny paper. But they did a great job, including all the switch plates. Then they did the kitchen in a really pretty little flowered paper and gave us matching fabric at the wholesale price, so we were pretty thrilled with the whole deal.

Looking back, it's hard to believe that we once had a house like this. The ceilings in the living room were at least fifteen feet high and were covered with perfect wedding-cake plaster ornamentation, starting in the middle and frothing out to the edges. The floors were a now extinct heart pine that the locals called pumpkin pine, laid down in glowing foot-wide planks. If a rich person wants that kind of floor today, he has to tear it out of an old house like the one pictured here. I guess no pine trees live long enough to yield foot-wide planks and then some.

The fireplace in the photo above is, of course, solid white marble. Nearly every room in the place had one of these fireplaces, each one carved differently. You didn't dare put a glass of red wine down on the mantle, or there would be a permanent tattoo and every old handy man in the county would come in and tsk tsk at the stain. And candle drippings were murder to get up because of that sickening squick-squick sound that the marble would make if you tried to scrape across it with anything harder than your fingernail.

As for the big stove in the kitchen, it was a real, six-burner, four-oven, perfectly working Boynton from when the house was built, in 1868. Igor was very proud of the fact that he learned how to work it well enough to get through the winter on one match. You made a nice paper and wood fire at the first cold snap, say early October, and then once the fire was going, you poured on the coal and each and every night you banked it and each and every morning you shook down the grates and scared the cats and blew on it and ? Unbanked it?

By the time the kids were on their way to the school bus or the car caravans, the stove was glowing and the entire room was toasty. The edge of the stove not in the picture had a permanent bit of orangy-pink polyester fabric stuck to it from the melted sleeve our youngest child's snowsuit. I used to fill the kettle with snow and spices and let it simmer there all afternoon, but I never really cooked on it. Too much coal dust, too dangerous to work around.

And now, of course, I've muddled myself all into a puddle by staring into these two pictures for too long. If I were a school girl dreaming about my perfect house, I could understand it, but I am on the other side of these pictures now ... and yet they still they entrap me with their pleasing possibilities.

When we bought the house it was divided up into four big apartments, and by living in one of the sections and renting out the rest we were able to manage quite nicely. Little by little we saved and lusted after different parts of the house and eventually we were able to claim the entire place.

Whenever a visitor or a potential tenant would see it for the first time, they'd always ask, half-joking, half-not: "Are there any ghosts?" It was a natural enough question. I worried about it myself while we were in negotiations to buy it -- would it be the house of one of my recurring nightmares -- the house where there's always that one cold room with the doors that close behind you ... and you know the rest.

But this house was very sunny and friendly and grandmotherly, with wide porches and wooden cupboards and closets with tall wide shelves and hooks so high you had to stand on a stool to hang up your coat. Plenty of room for four kids, one little puppy, and many cats.

But you know what I'm going to say. Ghosts? Oh yes; yes indeed, this house has ghosts. The ghost of a little girl who collected plastic horses. The ghost of a little boy who slept in the widow's watch, even when it rained. The ghost of another little boy who broke a big round mirror and fled outside in the snow without a coat because he was so upset. The ghost of a little girl in an orangy-pink snowsuit.

My ghosts.

Tomorrow.