The Garage Sale

It's amazing, really, that we can get anyone to come to a garage sale at our house. There are a lot of obstacles that stand in the way. First, we live on a private, one-lane street. Secondly, our driveway is so long and narrow, it takes a college degree to figure out how to get off of the driveway once you are on the driveway. But you put up the signs, and the garage salers come out of the woodwork. And a couple of weekends ago, come they did.

We practically gave stuff away, which was fine with us; we just wanted the Stuff gone. We had two star shoppers. One was a lady who seemed to be in as much need of a friend as our junk because she stuck around for about 3 hours talking and browsing. She took most of our backyard furniture. I hope the listening ear I gave her for those 3 hours was a treasure for her as much as our junk.

Another shopper bought our outside swing and then inquired about our playground. It's a big playground, one that took Mark and a friend a week to assemble. Mark said, "Sure you can take it so long as you disassemble it." She brought in reinforcements, and cleared it out of our yard. During the disassembly, she asked about our storage shed that sits in the corner of our lot, the big storage shed which Mark painted the same color as our house so it would, you know, look like it belonged to our house. It's not for sale. I hope we don't come back to Atlanta for a visit to find our house has been disassembled brick by brick by her and her crew and carted off to who-knows-where.

Of course there was also the shopper with whom I refused to deal. We had our pack & play out for sale. $5.00 is all I was asking. This shopper asked me what my final price was. I'm sure I looked at him like he was crazy. Least I hope that's the look I gave him. "Ummm...it's a crib. It's $5.00." He wanted to give me $3.00 for it. It ended up not selling, and we ended up giving it to the playground lady for free, but I'm happy with that. You see, it's the principle of the matter.

So 20 years of junk is gone. What didn't go out in the trunk of someone else's car has gone to Goodwill or to the dump. Here's hoping we don't accumulate that much junk in the next 20 years of our lives. A futile hope I'm sure.