Neighborhood Garage Sale

It’s  no secret that I love a good garage sale.  Rummaging is just entertaining.  You explore neighborhoods you don’t ordinarily drive through, and other people’s junk never ceases to be interesting.  Sometimes I make up stories about the people who were once attached to the items laid out for sale.  On a practical note, I’ve clothed my family from garage sale finds for years and years, and I have so many stories of serendipitous finds:  things we needed that I miraculously came across at random rummage sales.  Friday is usually my day to explore garage sales.

Every few years our street does a neighborhood garage sale, and we had heard rumors that this was the year. Somehow we missed the information flyer, and we hadn’t thought much about it for a few weeks.  Last Wednesday night I happened to be talking to my neighbor across the street, and she mentioned that they were busy getting ready for the neighborhood garage sale, and asked if I was participating.

“When is that, actually?”  I asked.

“Tomorrow,” she replied.

Because we had a few things in mind to sell, I sent a kid over to the house of the person organizing the affair with a payment for advertising (I love how cheap the costs of running a garage sale are when you do it as a neighborhood).  Then I spent the rest of the night frantically searching for all the junk I could find that we didn’t want and hadn’t sent to a thrift store.

When I hold a garage sale,  I price things to move.  Most things were fifty cents, with a few exceptions.  We sold a lot of stuff, and I was really happy.

An avid garage saler myself, I thoroughly enjoy people watching at a garage sale.  There are so many interesting personalities.  When I was setting out all of the stuff in our driveway (we didn’t have time to prepare our teensy garage, so it really was a yard sale for us), I couldn’t help wonder who might purchase the things I was hauling about.  It was so interesting to see who picked which things to be their treasure, so much more entertaining than dropping off things at a thrift store, which, for practical reasons, is what we do most of the time with stuff we don’t want.  Some people get excited about books.  Some people buy things that they don’t have a clue how they will use, but it seems like they might have a need for what they are buying.  One guy was so excited about a tool my husband was selling that he practically skipped over to my cashbox and exclaimed, “This is my lucky day!”  I know that feeling, so it was kind of fun to see someone else find something they were excited about, something that I didn’t think we’d actually sell and something that countless others had already passed by.

On the first day of the sale traffic was heavy until it started to rain.  After a bit I found myself sitting outside under my umbrella, all of my merchandise covered with blue tarps.  Still, people were trickling though, peeking under the tarps and buying things.  The mosquitos weren’t biting in the rain, and all my kidlets were inside because they didn’t want to get wet, so I decided that having a garage sale in the rain was actually quite peaceful.  Maybe a little chilly, but peaceful still.

The weather on the second day of the sale was truly perfect.  The mosquitos thought so too, but I had a few different tactics to avoid them.  Slthered in sunscreen, I spent the morning outside in my chair reading a book of Billy Collins’ poetry in between customers, while Mr. TOF played with his ball and pretended that the swings on the swing set were trains.  A child who truly delights in social activity, he talked to everyone he could who came to look things over.  He not only enjoys going to a good garage sale, he also likes hosting one, it turns out.

The third day of the neighborhood garage sale was cold, foggy and very rainy again, and since I had sold a lot already, I didn’t bother trying to negotiate through the inclement weather.  The neighbors using their garages sill had sales, though, and there was an unbelievably large number of people who traipsed up and down the street in the rain.  We rummagers are hard core.

Perhaps most entertaining of all was the gaggle of children on my end of the street, which included my own kidlets, and the kidlets kiddy corner from our house, as well as those across the street who spent every bit of time that they weren’t in school shopping at one another’s sales as well as all the other  sales.  They’d go from one place to the next, securing great bargains, and then zoom through again to see if they missed anything the first time around, or if anyone had put something new out the next day.  They were having such a great time.