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Yard sale, a self own

It’s yard sale weekend in my town.

Ads have been placed. Maps were drawn up. Neighbors all around us have been setting up shop with GAP-like folding skills and designing their card tables and porch rails as if they contained the inventory of an Anthropologie.

The kids are giddy. They will canvas the neighborhood with glee. See, they have plans for a lemonade stand that would bankrupt Country Time if the snippets I’ve scrolled past in my Twitter feed are to be believed: 1) that municipalities across this great land are ticketing kid-run drink stands and 2). the lemon-powered-sugar mix magnate will pony up the cash little tykes will need to pay the fines.

Meanwhile, the husband has been stockpiling inventory his entire adult life for just this occasion. And like the hoarder he claims not to be, he will haul this stashed trash to the driveway in multiple trips, arrange the wares artfully, and refuse to barter under any circumstances.

You are looking at a five-gallon bucket of chains, man! Do you know how much you’d pay at LOWES?”

Of course, he is shrewd. And his junk, no matter how rusted and decrepit, retains value even at scrap metal prices.

But the real detritus is pretty much anything I would ever fold or fan out on a table.

The odd basket, a silly tchotchke, items of the one-use-wonder variety. Things that probably weren’t worth one dollar, let alone the twelve or more I had probably paid to cart them out of a store. A dull pair of scissors with handles that look like the Eiffel Tower and bruise the soft pads of your fingers. What a bargain.

It can feel a little too personal.

Let me tell you; it takes a certain mental fortitude to watch a stranger flip through a dusty milk-crate of your ’80s vinyl with an expression of disdain to realize your insides are made out of molten marshmallows.

I’ve had enough of this semi-annual setting up shop

with wares that become an irrefutable indictment of my life choices and my prowess as a consumer (or lack thereof).

“Just take it,” I’ll say to the browser who approaches ... I’m so sure she will make me an offer. ...

“No. I’m not interested in any of these bobble-head ducks. I was just wondering if you knew where Cortland Street is? The paper said they had antiques.”

I point in a southerly direction: “Go two blocks down, take a right and your fourth left. You won’t miss it.”

My favorite part comes at the end of the day - around three o’clock or so - when the cars don’t even bother to slow down to assess the trash/treasure ratio. That’s when you can take everything that’s remaining and drag it to the end of the driveway, dust your hands and be done.

Chances are, overnight the picker fairies will visit to disprove the theory that my stuff is so bad I can’t even give it away. Especially if they take the stuff and leave us the exquisite gift of empty boxes.

Don't let the bastards grind you down

The eighth-grade dance is coming up.

You know what that means right?

A sweet little ritual, with dancing and punch, that ends in fond memories of youth's splendor?

That was last week.

This week it means drama.

And torment.

It means a choreography of complicated steps that will undulate around dress selection and hairstyles and photo-perfect moments (to be virally shared on one of the grams or chats or other networks that bind our whole lives up in knots). It means invitations for pre-parties and post-parties will swirl in the web like a tangle and somehow disappear at the last possible moment like some form of cursed magic.

And some kids will sit it out, engaging in their first cake benders alone in their rooms with the saddest ballads they can pull into their playlists. Who needs a stupid dance, anyway?

Of course, "Cindy" will say something biting about "Jane," and people will say it's terrible but agree that they all secretly hate Jane. They use a cold shoulder as their filter. The "truth" becomes a blunt weapon.

Jane, no doubt, doesn't make things easy for herself. When she speaks her mind, unfiltered, it comes back to bite her. Few people, she's learning, can juggle these popularity batons because they are on fire.

The thick skin everyone's telling you about is really just a blister.

Please join me in a piece of spiced, chocolate cake if this sounds familiar.

I'm eating some now. Crumbs are gumming up my keyboard, which I should probably take as a sign.

Nothing good ever comes from venting.

Especially in a vice principal's office in 1984, where the best advice he could give me was in Latin: "nolite te bastardes carborundorum" - Don't let the bastards wear you down.

Harden yourself.

Which, no matter how much we hate it, is the best advice we can heed.

And I will have to do again because I am powerless to stop this seemingly putrid rite of passage, a phase of life that few people wish to relive but can't avoid if they have human children: The moment your best friend moves on without you, and you feel alone.

The moment all the kindness in the world seems to get sucked out of a gaping hole in your armor.

It's a moment that can haunt your life forever, but mostly because if you are honest with yourself, there was a similar hurt that you put onto someone else, maybe without even knowing.

It’s a problem that doesn’t have a one-size solution.

The dance isn't the problem. Nor are the hopes and dreams and expectations. Meanness isn’t even the problem since it is relative (meaning your relatives are most certainly the perpetrators and mine are the victims and vice versa).

Everyone is nursing a wound.

Expectations are hard to control. Feelings are hard to untangle. But we are all in this mess together.

Everyone's hurting. Just ask a parent.

For right now, the best advice I can give her is: get dressed, get out there and dance like nobody’s watching even if it winds up on one of the tubes. Nolite carborundum.

Work, party

The weekend had arrived early. By Thursday our bags were packed and loaded into the car. The GPS clocked our arrival for sometime around midnight, but we’d pull into the deep woods of grandmother’s house in the neighborhood of one in the morning. Too late for anything more than to accordion ourselves out of the car and into the beds that awaited us, already made up and waiting. 

Perhaps we’ll unpack the car in the morning. The ultimate in early starts.

The children weren’t happy. 

Of course they love their grandmother. And Maine. And all the things that are familiar in their lazy-summer experience of our northernmost state, excluding the five hours of motion sickness they have to fight through to get there.

For this reason (and my general ineptitude) dinner wasn’t even a thought, let alone an afterthought.

It didn’t help that they were hungry as their stomachs started to settle and I hadn’t thought to brings snacks. I knew all the cupboards would be bare.

"You really are the worst mother ever,” my daughter says with glee. “Real mothers have all kinds of things in their bags in case of emergencies. Like lifesavers and packets of crackers and wallets.”

Darned kids. Forget your wallet one time and you’ll never hear the end of it.

Honestly, they have no idea how lucky they are to have a mother who is ill prepared.

They have had to be resourceful. They’ve had to problem solve. They’ve had to plan ahead … and around me.

They don’t see it quite that way … 

They’ve never been expected to do much of anything other than run, swim and play, and, on occasion, take their dirty dishes and put them near the sink. Asking them to load a dishwasher will provoke a panicked stare.

From their perspective, responsibilities come later. Once they are out of college and on their own. Right now they have an idyllic childhood to muster out of sea air and mosquito bites.

Now is the time for adults to take care of them; to make sure they get enough to eat and that they’re not playing with fire.

Except this trip -- one that commemorates 75 years of their grandmother’s life with the unveiling of her long awaited three-seasons room in her beloved year-round home — will require them to wear aprons and wait on tables.

Take orders and deliver meals to the big table. They will have to check in with guests to see if drinks should be replenished or if they've had enough of the sesame noodle salad. They will eat separately  … and in the ceiling-fanned comfort of the new room.

Maybe it’s to our credit that our children seem to be naturals at service. They’ve made place cards with menus inside they will mark with selections. They even seem to be having fun, as they deliver the meals with a smile. 

Invited guests marvel at the kids' efficiency and grace. Probably thankful their potatoes didn’t arrive with thumbprints.

But they were marvels.

They had circulated appetizers and taken beverage orders as if they were being paid in currency rather than good will.

My son had even affected the appearance of a snooty wine sommelier, who would judge you harshly for pairing salmon with merlot.

Even as they are sent out to the porch with their own dinners, they return at the sound of a bell, ready to be of service, to which we feel a little red faced. We had only meant to silence the table for an announcement, not summon the waitstaff.

Of course tomorrow they would be red-faced too, as we had plans to play with fire.

Literally … dragging brush from the woods onto the bonfire in the yard.