Stella Sigh the scavenger She seeks out one man’s trash, makes it her treasure
Published 12:00 am Sunday, January 30, 2011
She can blame it on insomnia caused by cancer and fed by compulsiveness or boredom — but whatever the reason, Stella Sigh is proof that one man’s trash is another’s treasure.
Stella is a scavenger, and the proof is in her warehouse of discarded items, chairs and tables and whatever on her porch, just waiting for rehab. Even the furnishings of her Second Street home, and what started with one chair, is an avocation that takes up most of her time.
In 2002, Stella found that she had cancer. The treatments made her sleep all day, then she’d wake up at 1 a.m. wondering “Now what?” The answer was to walk around Walmart, which stayed open all night (that’s before we had a 24‑hour Kroger).
“So I would walk around every night. I knew where everything was and just before I was going to apply for a job as a greeter or a personal shopper,” fate intervened, she said. She was driving down Loviza Street that runs from the stadium onto Polk Street, “and sitting there in the garbage was a chair, a wonderful chair. So I just stopped and got it. And the rest is history.”
Soon she was keeping an eye on curbsides where trash and garbage were stacked, and her chair collection grew. She wasn’t sure what to do, “So I started making people chairs. They had shoes on, eyes, a nose and a mouth — all that.”
This was Stella’s secret, however, for she didn’t want her son, Kiger, a Washington attorney, to know, and she didn’t tell her friends “because they would have thought it was horrible,” so she just kept on quietly scavenging, going around in the wee hours picking up stuff, “but when it started piling up out here, the word got out.”
Stella’s suspicions about the reaction were correct: her friends “were just horrified, all of ’em. My son just couldn’t believe it, that I was going through people’s garbage. I kept doing it anyway.”
What began with chairs grew to include any item that could be useful once it went through Stella’s rehab. She has her guidelines: “anything that I can find in the garbage, but this is the deal. Everything that I do has to come from the garbage or be discarded.” Friends sometimes bring her items.
Lots of times, she said, she might find a chair with a missing leg, but she’ll put it aside until she comes across another with only one leg — and that will show up in time. Even replacement parts must come from the trash, but to Stella, “it’s just amazing how my need for something is driven by the fact that when I go out I find it.”
What she finds she repairs, then decorates, usually with discarded paint which limits her choice of colors though she likes bright ones, especially red. She has always liked patterns such as quilts, “that kind of stuff,” but her real love is for dots.
She starts with one big one, puts another inside it, then another and another on that one, “and the next thing you know I’ve got dots everywhere. I just love dots. I love circular things like marbles.” It’s a form of folk art, and she’s had no lessons — “oh, no, no nothing, no talent.” She has to force herself to quit.
She’s had people say (probably some who have seen too much of the TV series “Antiques Roadshow”), “I can’t believe you painted that.”
Stella reminds them that though a lot of the chairs she finds are antiques, “they are in poor condition — very poor condition. Some things deserve to be painted.”
She has a favorite find, a chair she’ll never sell “because it is so wonderful in that you can read what has happened to it over the years just by looking at it — different paints, different repairs and all of that, and I put on the bottom, ‘Created by Time, saved by Stella Sigh’ and the date I found it. I can’t paint it — it’s just too wonderful.”
What people throw out would surprise you, she said. All the furniture in her house, “with the exception of the mattresses — I draw the line there,” has come from the garbage. The most valuable thing she has found was a vase appraised at $1,500.
She still goes out early in the mornings, picking up stuff in her small blue car, “It’s amazing what you can get in it,” she said. “I have bungee cords in the back. People ask how in the world I get some things in there, and I say I have my ways.”
Recently she felt like she had hit the jackpot for there on the curb just waiting for her was a stack of solid wood cabinet doors, perfect for making table tops and chair bottoms.
It isn’t always like that, though, for there have been times, but not very many, when she has put things back that were too far gone, items she thought she could use but couldn’t. “It’s really bad garbage to be rejected by Stella,” she laughed.
She grew up in Vicksburg, went to Carr Central and Cooper, married Tweedy Sigh when they were young, worked to put him through school and then went herself to Southern Miss, earning a degree in elementary education. For 28 years she taught, eventually covering every subject, was with the gifted program for 15 years and during the last few taught math in junior high.
She’s the fifth female in the family named Stella. Her parents met when her father, from New York, came here as a salesman and in the late 1940s went to Morrisey’s Showboat that was docked on the Louisiana side of the canal. He was leaning against the bar when he saw a pretty girl dancing and asked who she was, because he intended to marry her. The barkeeper basically told him to forget it “because that’s Eustace Conway’s daughter.” If there had been a bet, the barkeeper would have lost.
Stella and Tweedy were married almost 16 years when they adopted a baby boy, naming him for Stella’s great‑grandfather. On the Sighs’ 16th wedding anniversary, Tweedy had a heart attack and died. He was 36.
Raising a child and teaching didn’t leave time for much else because “anyone who teaches doesn’t have time for hobbies,” Stella said.
Her teaching career ended because of cancer, which ironically was detected by her dog, Scruffie, who was also a castoff “who kept bothering me.” She had a medical exam and found the cancer was very aggressive, but she’d had it a short time, “and if it hadn’t been for Scruffie I wouldn’t be here. I thought I wasn’t going to make it. My mother and grandmother (both also named Stella) died of cancer, so I just thought it was my fate. The thought of dying doesn’t scare me,” but she fixed everything, retired, made sure her son would get her retirement money and everything — “and then I didn’t die” she mused. “So now I live in poverty.”
She’s given away a lot of her finds and sells some because money is a necessity. Her first sale was of five chairs bought by a shopper at the Attic Gallery. Some items are at a consignment/antique shop on Washington Street, and Stella also sells from her home.
She does her rehab work in the living room, making a mess but cleaning it occasionally, then gets it out again “and (I) go crazy, then put it back up. That’s my compulsivity thing.”
She’s become a success at her garbage picking, Stella said, and “it’s very odd, but now my friends are my champions. They wouldn’t dare pick it up, but they’ll call me. I have scouts. Like this morning Susan called and said, ‘There’s some stuff on Chambers Street,’ or Minor will call that “they’ve put stuff out there by the school,’ and I’ll run pick it up.”
Stella likes what she’s doing and she foresees only one ending.
“When I die,” she said, “the stuff I don’t get through with, somebody’s going to have to put it back in the garbage.”
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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.