The classified ads section of The Washington Post was oddly thick this morning. It was as though time had rolled back to the days of healthy newspapers. There was page after page of ads, a pure-cash haul of the sort that once kept local papers thriving.

But it didn’t take long to notice a certain sameness in the pages. Most of the ads were much larger than the typical classified. And they all started the same way, with a centered headline that simply stated, “TRUSTEE’S SALE.”

That’s a euphemism for “A foreclosed home is being sold.”

Scroll through the ads and you’ll recognize neighborhoods rich and poor, and properties that once sold for prices high and low. We don’t seem to be so much in the liar-loan territory with these foreclosures; study the fine print and it looks like a number of these are homes where a family simply hit hard times.

The ads go on for 27 pages: A condo here, a suburban ranch house there, a million-dollar-plus McLean McMansion over there, a house a few blocks over on page E26. You notice the note on the nearby house was for more than 7 percent. That makes you wonder if the former occupants got taken for a ride at closing by a mortgage broker and a real estate agent, working hand in commissioned glove.

Dozens of homes. Hundreds of homes. Twenty-seven pages of misery. Until these ads take up a lot less space in the newspaper, any talk of a true economic recovery seems false.