Scenes from Yard Sale

The community yard sale was held last week, and against my will to be lazy and just pretend like it didn't exist, the Husband was raring to go.

In our old house, on the "avenue", traffic is heavier and while we lived in our development, we were the only house on block in the development, thus the only house to participate in 2014.  We put of out our tables after four hours made $35.

Last year, we missed the sale because we had moved the Tuesday before into our current house.  Exhausted, and unfamiliar with how much difference moving 1,000 feet can be, we didn't think that it was worth our while to make another thirty-five dollars so we passed.  We were, however, not prepared for the throngs of people that arrived, clogging up our street and the sidewalks.

So this year, we were in for a penny, in for a pound.   I got up at 5:30, helped drag out the tables, and the yard sale bins and the "sign", which is an oil painting of a nude woman sitting cross leged in a chair, her hair cropped like a bad bob of bushy straw color hair and pointed breasts shaped like ski jumps.  To this painting, we have a affixed a cartoon bubble that reads "Yard Sale Here".

"Do we really need that," asked the husband.

Yes.  She brings people in.  And she is not for sale.

Ten, twenty or thirty years ago, you used to be able to score some antiques of value at a yard sale.  But with eBay and Craigslist, and people watching Antique's Roadshow, the likelihood of that happening has dropped.

So if we had anything that had real value that we were getting rid of, we'd sell it in those venues instead of putting it out in a yard sale where someone would offer you a buck for a $100 Mid Century Modern Orefors vase, and be offended when you say you could go ninty.

In Ohio, yard sales are a staple with people buying, people selling. There is some dickering with prices, and some questions, but for the most part its pretty low key.

In Maryland, they buy much less, expect you to foolishly part with valuable antiques for pennies on the dollar, and they judge you a great deal more.

Our yard sales are a few tables of interesting stuff.  The people across the street are big time yard sale people and they operate an amazing say with twenty tables, and items arrange like a department store.

This year, the customer's were an interesting lot:

There was the six year old child who was fascinated by the old school adding machine, which he bought with his birthday money for $2.

There was the eighty-year old music aficionado who bonded with my husband over the collection of CD's he was selling.  "Oh, SQUEEZE!" she crowed.  "I was listing to this and Del Amitri this morning singing along.  Do you have any Avett Brother's?"

She danced a bit to the music in her head, periodically lifting her cane into the air in the joyful noise only she could hear.  She left too soon.

Then there were the one's who stayed too long.

There was the glum man who reminded me of Ingmar Bergman's Death, and had watched too many episodes of American Pickers who wanted to know what was in our back shed.   "I might be interested in looking through that shed to see if there was anything I might buy from you."  

I told him that nothing was for sale in the shed, "otherwise we would be having a shed sale instead of a yard sale."

There was the Lego man, a mild mannered late fifties man who haunts these sales looking for vintage Lego's.

"When he approach he squinted his eyes, got an unhappy look on his face and asked "Do you have Lego's for sale?"  I told him no.  "Well, I'll wait here while you go inside and take a look to see if you have any you want to part with."

I explained to him that when I said we had no Lego's inside or out, and thus none for sale he judged my childhood. "It's a shame you didn't have none to play with when you were child."

Fuck you.  Seriously, fuck you.

We had an extra Christmas Pickle that I had bought last year.  It was still in its jar, with label when a woman with what looked to be a broken tear duct arrived and sniffed at it.

"Who would need this?" she asked with more than a hint of condemnation in her voice, which for a second made me like her a bit because it reminded me of something my mother would have said.

I explained that the tradition is that you hide the ornament on the tree on Christmas Eve and that the first child to find it on Christmas Morning had the honor of opening the first present.

"Well it evidently didn't bring anyone in your house any good luck."  My momentary liking of her disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.  My mother may have been passive aggressive, but she was never an asshole.

I wanted to tell her that it had been wrapped as a gift for a someone who would drop my with a present, and that if she had dropped by I would have given it to her, but that would have exposed how petty and angry I was at her in the moment.   In my mind I was pointing my finger into her bony neck while an imaginary customer gladfully paid "only a dollar?  I would give five dollars for such a lovely Christmas Pickle..." saying "Well, what do you say about that Christmas Pickle now, you old asshole?"

Not long afterward, another woman made it to the Christmas Pickle and asked what was in the jar.  The Husband, sensing that my will to describe the pickle and its tradition was waning, stepped in, and carefully removed the glass ornament from its protective enclosure.

"Why that's a cucumber, not a pickle!" the lady exclaimed.  "I had a lovely cucumber yesterday for lunch," she stated with authority when out of nowhere, and like Brick from The Middle she whispered  "Cucumber."  She bought it for a buck and seemed pleased as punch with her purchase.

We also had:

• The hyper-child who had to touch everything, with, according to his mother who was in denial, "Lots of energy."
• The Yard Sale goer who tells you all the great things that they have seen down the street that "much better quality than what I see here."
• The Gold Coin Guy who asks "Do you have a gold coins that you want to unload?"
• The Camera Guy who is looking for "any vintage German made slide film cameras that you want to get rid of?"

And finally, the Mid Century Modern guy.  He is legend in the hood.  Evidently he comes from very old money and asks where you have placed the Mid Century Modern items.  He drives an Mercedes and is clothed in tattered L.L. Bean with ancient Gucci loafers, all which looks as if he's been sleeping in them.  Worse still is that he is a messy smoker.  

The past two yard sales he's swept in looking for the stuff, and has asked for a tour of our houses, which we ignore, because it creates an awkward silence that tells him he is overstepping the lines of propriety.  

"You mean the guy who looks like he's been sleeping in an ash tray?  That's, Biff?" said my neighbor Murial.  "My mother went to school with his mother.  He moved back from the Cape to take care of her.  So he trolls these sales looking for "Mid Century Modern" stuff.  Most of the time he'll tell you that he's been hanging out in a bar with John Waters, but John will tell you that Biff seems to always show up at the bar he's at."

Like a stalker?

"No, more like someone who likes to think of himself as part of John's entourage, but John doesn't have one of those.  But yeah, Biff is a bit pushy.  And he needs a bath and flea dip..."

When it was all said and done at noon, we had netted just under $200 dollars, so for five hours work, we made some money.  The unsold stuff went to Goodwill. 

And a promise from the Husband that we get to sit next year's sale out.