My new business card reads “Estate of Mind,” and below, in italics, “We empty your nest.” Though I’ve been working alone since my parents retired, I’ve retained the “we” for sentimental reasons, and to sound less like the one-woman operation I hope to keep afloat.

I’ve been estate-sale adjacent since I could add and give change, spending weekends at a table, wrapping and bagging purchases. If buyers tried to negotiate, I’d point to the stated price on the tag or sticker, and ask blankly, “Do you not want it?”

But the grown-up me has learned to be kinder and more psychiatric. I know when to hand-hold and when to hard-sell. Some clients can tell a story about every item in their house if I let them, and sometimes I do. If anyone is convinced that the unsigned portrait over the fireplace is an Old Master, I don’t argue. I let the small local auction house with which I have a relationship (I recommend them; they recommend me) be the bad guy. As ever, they agree that the work in question is either NSV (no sale value) or TFO (the frame only). Yes, I can get $100 for a decent still life by an unknown artist, but it’s small comfort to the surviving children, who grew up expecting that their inherited treasures would be auctioned off for millions.

I wish I could say that no two houses are alike, but Harrow, Massachusetts, has several subdivisions where only the paint colors differentiate one property from another. Inside, there are few surprises. I know what the big-city, apartment-dwelling beneficiaries won’t want: the gas grill, the Weber grill, the porch furniture, the fireplace tools, the lawn mowers, the rakes, the snow shovels, the hedge clippers, the left-handed golf clubs and warped tennis rackets, the recalled playpen, the crib bumpers, the furry toilet seat covers and crocheted tissue-box holders; the DVDs, the cassette tapes, the VHS tapes, the college textbooks, the shag rugs, the sewing machine, the electric typewriters, the souvenirs bought at airport gift shops, the aluminum saucepans, the grape-jelly juice glasses, the empty mayonnaise jars. To my constant amazement, almost everything finds a buyer and a home.

I’m proud of our excellent Yelp reviews complimenting our bedside manner and my parents’ talent for curing a lifetime of buyer’s regret. One written salute to their “Midas Touch” is now reproduced on my invoices. Still, it’s not my calling; the accolades don’t stop me from thinking, Just one more summer . . . just one more sale.

My parents are torn; they want their old business—formerly Finders, Keepers, renamed by me to a more zeitgeisty Estate of Mind—to thrive and to outlive their retirement, yet they want me to be fulfilled, and to put at least one of my degrees to good use.

My most recent one, attended online, in narrative nonfiction, makes them nervous. They ask, “If you’re supposed to ‘write what you know,’ wouldn’t that lead to a tell-all in very bad taste?”

I’m not going to do that. How could I forget my father, widowed young, smiling, shaking his head in something like wonder, asking as we loaded a cracked mirror or a wheelbarrow into a stranger’s car, “Did you ever think your dad would be having as much fun again in this lifetime?”