Yard Sale Reverie

The woman picks up a small, blue-green clay pot. A friend of mine made it. It’s been in the basement so long I had almost forgotten about it.

It’s hard to imagine that my daughter will be gone in three years. The thought of it scares me. The space I’ve made in my life for her is large. I don’t know how I’ll fill it.

I went to college just thirty miles from home, but it might as well have been three thousand. Once I went off to school, at the ripe old age of seventeen, I returned only for vacation, and even some of those were spent traveling across the country, attending a school in Mexico, or working in Maine. I waitressed the one summer I spent at home, working the evening shift until 11 p.m. and returning home in the wee hours of the morning after visiting with friends. I would climb the stairs as quietly as I could and tiptoe past my parents’ bedroom. Our lives seemed worlds apart.

She is making it easier for me though. At the grocery store as I empty my cart, I hear, “ Mom! Don’t slam the food down like that on the counter. They’ll think you’re mad.” As I talk at dinner, I become aware that she is no longer listening to me. She’s watching me. “ Mom, you make such funny faces when you talk.” Or, as I leave the house, I get the once-over and a verdict, “Let me give you a fashion tip. OK? That blouse does not look good with that vest. You really shouldn’t go out in public looking like that.”

My husband is not exempt either. She hisses under her breath as he tries to get a waitress’s attention in a restaurant. He wants the check so we can leave. “Dad, don’t do that!” Then, “Oh, God. I’m so embarrassed.”

My mother went through a similar stage when I was a teenager. She was friendly with store clerks and actually asked questions in public when she needed directions or information. If she could get through it, I guess I can.

And after my years at college, I always enjoyed visiting my old home. But, things are never the same.

The woman is now holding the pot along with the plates as she scans the shelves for other items. I remember it overflowing with ivy on the windowsill in an apartment my husband and I lived in long ago. I find myself taking it back and saying, “I don’t think I really want to sell these plates. or this pot.”

No problem. The woman peers through the semi-darkness and spots an old bureau, one handle gone, another hanging loose. “ How much do you want for the bureau?”

“Twenty bucks,” I say. It’s a deal. We quickly set to, emptying the drawers, putting them back, and lugging it up the basement stairs into the sunlight. Outside, I show her my guitar, we dicker over the price, settle at sixty-five dollars, and it’s gone. Into the van and away to a new life. Her son might give it a try. She’s satisfied, and so am I.

Shoppers came by with hardly a break all day. Most things weren’t marked with prices, so bargains had to be negotiated for items large or small, with or without sentimental value. I won’t forget soon the little, bent woman with a cap of gray hair elbowing a stocky man away from the fishing pole she wanted.

“How much do you want for this pole?” he asks me.

“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask my husband. He just went upstairs in the garage with someone interested in seeing the rest of his traps.”

The woman announces, “ I already asked and am waiting for an answer,” and edges closer to the pole. The man looks like he is going to argue, but thinks better of it.

We also got some advice from the fellow who bought my old oak chair for eight dollars. His bright blue T-shirt proclaimed, “ This isn’t a beer belly, this is a storage tank for a sex machine.” “ Your house looks nice,” he says, “ but you know what it needs? You need to screen-in the breezeway, then it’d be perfect.”

We were pleased at the end of the day. We ended up $340 richer and many pounds lighter. I surprised myself when I couldn’t part with those dishes. And again, a few weeks later, in my continued fervor to clear out the old, when I tried to throw out a potholder, worn ragged with use, I held it in my hand, walked over to the trash bag, and couldn’t drop it in. I looked deep into the red and yellow prints and recalled the yard sale scraps I collected so long ago, the small squares I made from the big squares to make a pleasing configuration. The intensity of the colors nurtured my soul through the dark of winter as I fumbled for it and found it many a time in a drawer by the stove. Memories of my children in our yellow, wall-papered kitchen, sometimes happy, sometimes fretful, clinging to my legs with the misery of a new tooth erupting or a fever heralding a cold are vivid when I look at this remnant of my life.

Yes, our mountaineering customer was right. You can tell a lot about people by what they have for sale. But there’s also a lot to learn from what we can’t bring ourselves to part with. Some things are just not easy to let go. I’ll hang on to what I can for now, but the past has shown me the future.

“Elissa,” my husband asks, as I place the ragged potholder down on the dinner table to absorb the heat of a cast-iron casserole, “ that potholder is falling apart. Isn’t it about time you threw it away?”

Elissa Paquette is a New Hampshire-based writer.

The Front Porch Goes To Garage Sales

Pages: 1 | 2 | 3