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.