What’s your dirty little secret from the pandemic?

“I need to show you something.”

It didn’t sound good. My friend Maude, with her jet-black bangs just shy of “age appropriate,” smiled at me slyly. The same smile that had launched a thousand lacrosse players back in college; it was like she was going to show me something illicit, maybe even illegal.

Listen, I get it. We all did weird stuff over the pandemic. You did what you had to do to get by. I stopped paying attention to how many days I wore the same clothing, for example. As in: pajamas and day clothing were no longer two separate categories. At some stage my husband Ian pointed out that my sweatshirt had gotten stiff.

“No but this is bad,” Maude said biting her lip, bangs askew.

But “bad” during the pandemic was the norm. Remember that whole “new normal” thing? And then the “new, new normal?” Nothing was normal or even new normal. Meals were no longer consumed with any regard to time-ofday appropriateness: pork gyoza for breakfast? Check. Our family discovered how good Life cereal is and consumed bottomless bowls 24-7. To be honest, we are still half dwelling in these dark habits, one toe in the abyss ever more — appreciating all the while that Life Apple Cinnamon has nothing on Life Original.

“Yeah but you won’t get it until you actually see it for yourself,” Maude told me, angling me along.

But I was long gone, in my own reveries about that odd stretch of time. Didn’t Madonna get in a tub of milk with rose petals at some stage and call COVID the “great equalizer”… or did I dream that? Point is we all went a little nuts.

But Maude’s nuts was in a special category — you could tell by her bangs.

“I need to show you my … storage space,” she hissed like a convict.

It was like Maude was preparing to show me hidden cellulite, the kind that suddenly springs dimples after you turn 50, like some kind of sick joke … as if the very fat on your body is laughing at you.

“Claire, seriously — this IS my pandemic shame spiral.”

Maude lives in one of those Hudson River Valley towns that have kombucha on tap and Headless Horsemen. She had brought me to a weird parking lot with rows of storage garages, like the ones Hannibal Lecter makes Clarice go to in “Silence of the Lambs.”

Maude rolled back the garage door as if ripping off a Band-Aid to unveil her own bespoke masterpiece of horror.

And there it was: $19.99a-month cubic feet of floorto-ceiling couches, chairs, taxidermy lamps, game tables — there was even a 10-foot by 15-foot billboard advertising Puerto Rico. It was like Mrs. Havisham on Adderall.

Turns out Maude’s pandemic fall from grace was online estate auctions. During the pandemic, estate sales online took off — so instead of going to an actual estate and snooping through someone’s down-sizable life like a freak, now all you had to do was swipe right.

Maude was about a year in, and already she was racking up rental fees for two storage facilities full of the world’s most random stuff — all of it, somehow, “mid-century.” There would never be enough space in her current home (or her fictional future one) to use all the stuff she had collected, but that never seemed to register. A “Ming dynasty-inspired” three-story birdcage for the bird she’d never have, six complete sets of fine China, an 80-inch 19th century armoire because it looked like the one in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and Maude was convinced Aslan was on the other side. It was like the ultimate “salad of despair” — making the Pynchon quote we used to kvell over in 10th grade real.

“Wow,” was all I could say. The auction items sat in the storage facility like a giant jigsaw puzzle, maximizing all storage space by creating one big tangle of mid-century meh.

Turns out it wasn’t just about the stuff, Maude explained, it was about the adventure entailed in getting it. Finding trucks for pick-ups over two hours away, hiring a guy named Jesus who helped her move couches so oddly shaped they didn’t fit into U-Haul vans. She became a weird expert in furniture lines like Drexel, Pendleton and Baker while sneaking off to antique fairs to try to hock her wares. Occasionally she’d earn back her gas money, but one time she resold a ring for five times and from then on, she was a goner. She even bought a $300 booth at “Brimfield” until an 80-year-old French provincial revivalist began hitting on her. At some stage Maude noticed her husband had started to avoid all eye contact. So too did Jesus.

“I can’t stop,” she told me.

There are times in friendship when you reach a critical juncture. This often occurs just after a friend confides in you, when there is this weird ensuing moment; invariably your friend stares back at you, in the post-confessional shock of having laid bare their worst truth, waiting for your reaction as if every fiber in their existential being relied on it. You either embrace them, honoring the vulnerability in their trust and love, or … you avoid all eye contact. Instead I choose to …. But ALAS, dear readers, I will have to save all of that for another column because A) I’m try to hook you just like Dickens did in his serialized novels, B) I’m already well over my word limit, and C) Westport Auction is about to being its 541 lot bidding.

So until next time, just swipe right.