Sharifah McKay is holding a glass woman in her hands.
The one-of-a-kind sculpture once rose from a block of Lucite in heavy lead glass, a female figure whose long neck tilts gently above her body, one hand resting near her heart. Sharifah discovered her through an online estate sale in New Orleans and fell in love. Years later, while packing for a move, she accidentally knocked the sculpture over, shattering it.
Sharifah kept every piece.
“It still needs to be loved,” she says.
Sharifah’s Mandeville home is filled with beautiful things carrying older stories: paintings, antique mirrors, Art Deco women, figures with missing limbs and repaired heads. Some are too damaged to sell. Others passed through estate sales and antique shops before finding a new place to belong.
Sharifah makes room for beautiful things with a past.
Perhaps that is why people find their way to her after the loss of a loved one, while downsizing a family home, or when decades of belongings suddenly require decisions no one feels prepared to make.
What happens to the things we love when life asks us to let them go?
That question sits beneath Desert Lotus Estate Sales, the business Sharifah built to help families decide what stays, what goes, what holds value, what another person might love, and how the things gathered across a lifetime can continue their stories in another home.
A Life in Motion
Sharifah was born in Saudi Arabia, where her father worked as an engineer in the oil industry. When she was about four, the family moved to America, beginning a childhood that would stretch from Florida to California to a rural town in Georgia, where seven children under the age of twelve filled an old house with fireplaces in nearly every room.
“Every time we moved, we got rid of half of our stuff,” Sharifah says.
Then came Chicago.
Sharifah went from a Georgia town of roughly 300 people to the South Side, where she took the L downtown to shows at the Fireside Bowl and filled sketchbooks with clothing designs inspired by the 1920s, ’40s, and ’50s.
She dreamed of studying fashion in New York. Instead, she became a young mother, studied design in Chicago, and eventually found her way into advertising.
For years in sales, Sharifah went by Michelle, convinced potential clients would be more likely to return a call from Michelle than Sharifah.
When she finally left the corporate world, she left Michelle there too.
A Second Life
In 2023, just as Desert Lotus Vintage was beginning to take shape, Sharifah was cutting back elephant ears beside a koi pond at her Alabama home when a three-foot water moccasin struck her hand.
The bite sent her to Mobile Infirmary and left her with nerve damage and brain fog. For nearly six months, Sharifah struggled with medical expenses, inventory costs, and the uncertainty of a fledgling venture. Eventually, necessity won a round, and she returned to advertising, selling radio and digital media while continuing to build her antiques business on the side.
By then, Karen Lee, a retired Louisiana state trooper and third-generation antiques dealer, had become Sharifah’s mentor.
“You’ve moved a million times,” Karen told her. “You’re good at organization. You’re good at curating. You have great people skills. Why not estate sales?”
A New Beginning
Karen’s question followed Sharifah back to work.
By October 2024, she had started making plans to expand Desert Lotus and leave the corporate world behind for good.
That month, she launched the Desert Lotus website and, armed with enough accumulated inventory to furnish a small civilization, held her first small estate sale on the Northshore for a friend, hoping to get her name out into the world.
Then the phone rang.
A family had found her online. They were downsizing and needed an estate sale. A referral followed. Then another.
In 2025, her first full year, Sharifah conducted seventeen estate sales across the Northshore and New Orleans, with others in Mississippi and Alabama.
“So you help people let go?” I ask.
“I meet people who are often in the grieving process, and I try to make their lives easier so they can move on,” she says. “There are a lot of feelings and emotions wrapped up in possessions, especially when we experience loss. It’s really a healing process.”
Things Worth Carrying Forward
Most of us have an estate sale only once or twice in our lives, and we do not learn how the industry works until life suddenly requires us to.
“Most people have no knowledge about what it entails, “Sharifah says. “They don’t know what they need to do or what to expect from a good company. And they’re dealing with the burial, the family, the vehicles, the property. That’s a lot for anyone to carry.”
That’s why Sharifah begins with the basics.
An estate sale is a liquidation, not consignment.
“The whole point is to have a top-notch sale, earn you the most income in a timely and professional manner, and then get out so you can move on with your life,” she says.
That can mean washing dishes left untouched for years, cleaning furniture, removing carpet stains, and dusting every surface.
“I’ve seen every type of bug there is,” she laughs. “We do whatever it takes to make your home shine. And above all, we treat you and your family like our own, with the dignity and care you deserve.”
It also means knowing when to call an expert. Jewelry, precious metals, photography equipment, unfamiliar collections, and other valuables may require specialists she can consult.
“If an object has a story and a history,” Sharifah says, “I try to make sure people know that. The value is in the relationship with the person that object once belonged to.”
“If it’s special or you have a memory tied to it, those things stay. If it doesn’t have special meaning to you, then sometimes it’s time for it to continue its journey to a new home, and we help with that transition.”
Ask the Right Questions
“What questions should people ask before hiring an estate sale professional?” I ask.
“Whether you hire me or somebody else,” Sharifah says, “ask what the commission includes. Are there additional fees? Who will be working inside the house? Is the company insured? Will the home be emptied when the sale is over? Who earns income on items that don’t sell?”
Estate sales usually operate on commission, but that commission can cover very different levels of service. Some companies handle the sale itself, leaving the family to deal with what remains.
Desert Lotus is full service. Sharifah and her team prepare the home, clean and stage its contents, research and price each item, market and conduct the sale, then empty the house when the work is done. All of it is covered by one commission.
But beneath those questions is another: Who do I trust with my home?
For Sharifah, some of that answer is instinctive.
“Do I click with the person? Do I feel comfortable with them? Do I feel like they’re going to do right by me?”
Estate sales place strangers inside its most private corners. They open drawers and closets. They sort through desks, attics, jewelry boxes, photographs, financial papers, and forgotten hiding places where cash may have been tucked away years before.
“It can be a vulnerable experience,” Sharifah says. “You find money. You find diamonds. You find important documents and medication. You have to trust that the right company is going to hand those things over to the family.”
“It’s truly a trust-based industry.”
The Road Between
The line between Desert Lotus and family life is thin.
“I’m working on delegating,” Sharifah says, laughing.
Her husband, Peyton, now works alongside her, bringing years of plumbing and furniture-building experience to a business where old houses rarely surrender. Their daughter, who recently earned a master’s in marketing and communications, helped shape the Desert Lotus brand. Their fifteen-year-old son fills another calendar with marching band, wrestling, and robotics.
“What does free time look like for you?” I ask.
She reacts as though I had just invented the phrase.
“Well, I actually like to hunt for antiques,” she says. “I collect from all over. We do a lot of picking trips.”
One favorite took Sharifah and her daughter along the Highway 127 Yard Sale, a ribbon of roadside tables and tents running north from Gadsden, Alabama, toward Michigan.
“It’s the longest yard sale in, I think, the world,” she says, “and it’s so much fun. That’s where I pick all my treasures.”
At home, the collecting continues. Her studio holds racks of vintage clothing, sewing projects, and elaborate Carnival headpieces she makes herself.
“During Mardi Gras, this place is all feathers.”
What the House Remembers
At one Metairie sale, Sharifah found thirty-eight sewing machines and roughly forty quilts, many made by the woman who had lived there, along with a collection of 1960s-style paintings tucked into the attic.
“People went nuts over them,” she says. “Art is going to be loved by somebody. There's an audience for everything.”
As Sharifah cleaned, sorted, and staged the rooms, the house came back into focus. Furniture reappeared. Linens were washed. Collections took shape. Things the family assumed no one would want began leaving through the front door in someone else’s caring hands.
“You gave my mother’s belongings and her art a second chance at being seen, loved, and cherished,” one client told her.
Another remembered what happened as people began moving through the rooms:
“It felt like the home was alive again.”
What Love Leaves Behind
Every estate sale ends with an empty house.
But empty is not the same as gone.
A quilt changes beds. A painting changes walls. A wedding ring finds another hand.
Those are the things love leaves behind. Not simply possessions, but remains: visible memories of those who came into our lives and made us who we are.
And isn’t that what we do best as humans?
We bring each other into the future. We pass along our names, our dreams, our scars, our stories. We carry them from house to house and age to age until, without quite noticing when it happens, some of those things begin carrying us.
I kneel beside Sharifah as she cradles the glass woman, showing me where the pieces fit together.
“What do you love most about her?” I ask.
She studies the long neck, the tilted head, the hand reaching up to hold her heart.
“The lines,” she says. “The beauty.”
Sharifah wraps the woman in packing paper, but before she can return her to the cabinet, a beam of sunlight catches the glass edge and, for a brief second, scatters a thousand diamonds across the room.
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If you are downsizing, relocating, managing a loved one’s estate, or simply have questions about the estate sale process, contact Sharifah McKay of Desert Lotus Vintage & Estate Sales at 985-634-0066 or desertlotusvintage@gmail.com. Learn more at shopdesertlotus.com, or follow @desertlotusvintage on Instagram for estate sale tips, vintage finds, and behind-the-scenes looks at upcoming sales.
Pull Quote on Page 1 (20 Words Max): “Art is going to be loved by somebody. There's an audience for everything.”
Pull Quote on Flex Page 3 (which is Page 3 in this layout) (45 Words Max): "I meet people who are often in the grieving process, and I try to make their lives easier so they can move on. There are a lot of feelings and emotions wrapped up in possessions, especially when we experience loss. It’s really a healing process.”