We’re coming up on that time of year when the countryside breaks out in poison yard
sale. I don’t mean the occasional sprinkling of yard sales that go on all summer, a
little itch on this street, a little scratch in that neighborhood. I’m thinking about
the great rash of them, as the weather cools off. If you saw it from the air, all those yard sales would look like
a bad case of something splotchy — poison ivy, I think. My family used to joke about
forgetting to close the garage door on a Saturday morning and finding people had bought
everything in it while we were inside making coffee.
I don’t think other cultures
understand yard sales. When friends in Greensboro had one, their Japanese neighbor said,
“You mean you put your personal possessions out in the grass and people come to buy
them?”
The main thing you learn by going
to yard sales is what items you shouldn’t buy because you won’t use them any
more than anybody else does — exercise bikes, Crock Pots, exercise bikes, hot air
popcorn poppers, exercise bikes, spice racks with little bottles, exercise bikes, glass
baking dishes divided to hold two different things, and exercise bikes.
The main thing having a yard sale
teaches you is that no matter how awful doing it is, and no matter how firmly you swear
never to do it again, you will.
It also teaches you that people
are cheap and don’t play by the rules. The cheap ones hold up a really nice coffee
mug you’ve priced at 50 cents and say, “Will you take a quarter?”
The ones who don’t play by
the rules ignore your 8 a.m. start time and your ad saying “no early birds,” to
show up in front of your house at 6 a.m. Then they get annoyed if you won’t come out
in your pajamas to sell them the one good antique you advertised, before anybody else gets
there.
You learn some interesting things
about people by putting out a pile labled “free,” too. A few folks will look
down at it without bending over, as if to say, “I wouldn’t stoop to handling
give-aways.” Others will scarf up everything on the pile. Hey, it’s free, man,
free.
But the really bad part, for me,
is when people start milling around, all at once, wanting to change prices and pushing
money into your hands before you can peel off the color-coded stickers and fit them onto
your neat little chart for keeping track of sales. A fine accounting system gone to pot.
There’s one more thing to
this yard sale phenomenon. Sooner or later, you buy back everything you got rid of. If I
had all the things I’ve bought, sold cheap and then bought again, I’d have so
much money I wouldn’t have to work. Or, I could have saved all that stuff up and
accumulated enough to run a perpetual yard sale and still never have to work again.
For example, I have two Crock Pots
again. They don’t work any better than they ever did, no matter what size I try. I
have two yogurt makers again, too, and neither of them works as well as my heating pad for
maintaining constant warmth to culture yogurt. I don’t have another exercise bike.
But I do have a new rowing machine.
I have to go now. We’re
getting ready for our family’s fourth annual last-time-ever yard sale. |
Sara Pitzer