Today my sister and her Young Life team are organizing and manning their first annual yard sale.
My mom at one point being quite the avid partisan of The Yard Sale, I have been to my fair share of the grass laden consumer events. When I was younger, I remember being completely enamored with the subtle brilliance behind the premise of selling items from one’s yard. There people were, littering their grasses and driveways with objects, furniture, and clothes they deemed expendable, and in essence–garbage–that they wanted passer-bys, complete strangers, to purchase so that they can feel better about, and make a profit from, discarding said useless items. The sheer simplicity and ridiculousness of the whole yard sale venture remained entirely enthralling to me. Baby carrot sister and I used to bike around our neighborhood (She on her purple banana seat, me on my bright pink Huffy) scouring for yard sales, stopping frequently on weekends to peruse other people’s junk, looking for something we wanted. We often would pedal home in a fury after discovering an item that we could thereafter not live without, typically proceeding to beg our mother for the five dollar sticker price so we could feverishly pedal back to the sale before our coveted item was sold and lost forever.
Whenever we did that, my mother, ever yard sale savvy, would frequently look at us as if we were crazy, clearing wondering to herself if she raised monkeys who were somehow not skilled in the art of haggling? And then she’d tell us to go back and ask for our desired trash for less than the sticker price, less by at least half. Minutes later we would return home dancing and giggling with glee because look mom! we bought this half-empty package of stick-on earrings and a coloring book for two dollars! two dollars, not five! you were right! And then she’d laugh, and tell us we’d been had, and wear a stick-on earring or two, and know that yes, she did in fact raise two monkeys who possess no yard sale sensibility whatsoever.
My allure for the selling of a person’s junk from said person’s front yard, or backyard, or garage, has since diminished since I was eight, and I find myself increasingly bothered by the entire yard sale situation. I can’t remember the last time I visited a yard sale, and I know for certain I have never put one on myself. I realize now that it was perhaps fortuitous I never attempted, as, judging by today, I most surely would not have been successful with the pricing and selling and remaining calm throughout the entire process of watching my junk be carted away by smug older ladies who have seen enough yard sales to know that I don’t know what I’m doing and am therefore fair game for the conning.
I did donate a large amount of “goods” (see: rubbish, garbage, obsolete technology) to today’s yard sale, and was excited to do so, the entirety of today’s profits going to the Send Kids To YoungLife Camp 2005 fund, where kids go to run and jump and skip and play and wakeboard and tube, and to scream at decibels only encouraged at summer camp, and to ultimately joyfully torture their counselors like my baby carrot sister for weeks at a time. The purging of my room of excessive furniture and clothing and miscellaneous other objects was easy, and actually quite enjoyable.
Simple is nice; Less really is more!
But while I was helping to unload the heavier junk, and to arrange the pretty and impressive junk amidst the yard to prevent it from looking like the contents of our host garage and house had simply spewed themselves upon the front lawn, I became noticeably squeamish at the reality of the early yard sale goers approaching the premises with greedy, bargaining eyes, and instantly commencing with the bartering, circling their prospective buys like vultures waiting for the animal to just die already, skillfully diminishing the value of whatever they were circling while maintaining that they indeed wanted it for themselves. They were attempting, and succeeding thanks to my mom the yard sale veteran, a lady who knows how to haggle with the best of the hags, to purchase things that I should have been ok with watching be carted away for free. After all, if not for this causal inspired yard sale, I would have left all of it, sans profit, at the Salvation Army or local thrift store anyway, and obviously I don’t want any of it. That being said, there remained am part of me that instantly balked at the idea of listening to and watching strangers essentially steal items that I had once purchased with hard earned birthday money.
I was doing fairly well until early yard sale goer number one: the lady with the perpetual scowl, walked over to an essentially brand-new Columbia ski jacket whose only deficiency remains that it is the color yellow, and as fate would have it baby carrot sister doesn’t like yellow ski coats (a fact she remained too hesitant to tell the purchaser within thirty days of receiving it), and announced that she wanted it for ten dollars.
Tendollars? She’s stark raving mad, I thought to myself; She would pay overtwo hundred dollars for that coat in any retail store. I then briefly entertained the idea of walking over to her and offering her ten dollars to get a life.
Then I remembered this was not R.E.I., this was a yard sale. And that Columbia jacket, albeit more originally expensive junk, was still junk. Junk that we wanted to sell. And then I saw my mom seriously consider her offer. At that moment I made eye contact with my baby carrot sister from across the lawn, and she instantly being able to read the horror in my face, gave me a look and a nod of the head that said: Yes. Of course you can go. Please, for the love of ski jackets, get yourself out of this madness.
And without saying a word I yelled back to her “thank you, thank you, thank you!,” as I jogged to the truck and proceeded to quickly put my yard sale savvy mother, and the lady with the perpetual scowl who probably makes her living as a professional con artist, and the debris-ridden lawn where they both stood, in my rearview mirror.
I posted a picture of him for a silly Instagram-related game and found him waiting for me in my dreams, something which occurs so rarely it still explodes solidly-constructed dams inside me each time I see his face, mustached and smiling at mine just the way he always did, just the way I always remember him. As usual he didn’t say much, not anything I could hear or remember, but he was there and I knew it, and when I → Read more...
I have words washed out to sea. Words ushered quietly from my lips to my fingertips, waiting patiently for the right tide, for the moon to bring my stories alive.
I have words being reviewed, words accepted and words rejected, and I’m clinging to my favorite lines, fighting for them, and it feels strange and new and exhilaratingly infuriating, this tug-of-war of wills and how the slightest bit of caving can make me feel like I’m flirting with abandoning the sanctity → Read more...
[Alternately titled: Story, The Second: The Girl Who Moved To Washington State]
It began simply. A direct message on Twitter first, followed by texts; those texts, in turn, begat plans. With those plans came anxiety and apprehension – I didn’t know you, not your face or your voice or anything else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to – but also something exciting, a strange and unexpected hope hovering quietly on the horizon. And then we met, conversed and laughed → Read more...
Stories I said I had. Tangential stories and life-changing ones.
Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.
I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?
(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)
(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in → Read more...