“There’s another pink one – go left – HERE!” I am getting driving direction from Jen, whose yard sale jones has built since the recent arrival of two children and the resulting inability to leave the house very often. So this weekend, as her husband Kelley wrangles the kids at his mother’s house in the Berkshires, Jen is a free woman and is exercising her right to obtain what Kelley will call “big piles of crap” upon his return.

This sort of thing is not, frankly, my cup of tea. If I wanted to paw through piles of dusty bric-a-brac, I could clean out my basement, thereby spending no money and achieving a neat, organized storage area. Let's face it, yard sales are where tacky goes to die. Jen, however, claims to save millions by purchasing her children’s clothes and toys for pennies at these things. And I need a bookcase. So.

There is an alternate universe of yard sales, it turns out, that’s been going on under my nose for years. Jen is tuned into this world, and though we have circled certain ads in the paper this morning and have a plan, it is only minutes till the plan is abandoned and we are following hand-written signs around the neighbourhood in search of the unadvertised yard sale less travelled. Absent Jen, I would never have noticed most of these, though once I start looking they’re impossible to miss. So we end up trailing a series of cat shaped signs the color of Pepto-Bismal into an unfamiliar part of the neighbourhood, until we arrive at the home of an Asian family who are departing the area for points west, and whose packing strategy appears to involve selling off everything they own and just buying whatever they need when they get there.

There are packages of paper plates, blocks of post-it notes, piles of clothes, shoes, and jackets, toys, baskets, dishes, glassware, and in-line skates. There is a vacuum cleaner, selected works of art (including a print titled “Classical Hats”), and some sort of air pump that Jen briefly considers and then puts back down. Though billed as a yard sale, the merchandise is actually contained inside the downstairs area of the house, and since it’s ninety degrees today and no windows are open, I can’t leave fast enough. Jen purchases the paper plates and we are off.

We repeat the experience at four other locations, only one of which was a planned visit. None of these yard sales are farther than a mile from my condo, and there are additional sales we drive by without stopping. Jen assures me that this level of activity in the yard sale sector is standard for a weekend in July, and I wonder how I could have been so oblivious. (Yes, I have seen the weekly yard sale on School Street, which Miss OT tells me is run like a business – the sellers cherry-pick the neighbourhood and vicinity each weekend with the goal of marking up and re-selling items thus acquired during their own yard sale. You’ve got to wonder about the margin on that.) By the time we return, Jen has scored a large, sturdy wicker basket, a small pile of clothes and a vintage riding toy for her 18 month old, and some books for her four year old. Note that Jen did exhibit a degree of restraint – there was the Playskool outdoor climbing/sliding thing for $2 that she passed on, after acknowledging she had no backyard, as well as a few other things she liked but for which she saw no immediate utility.

And me? No bookcase, but I am now the owner of an item Kelley calls “the Amish grabber” – a wooden device resembling a large (thirty-six inch) pair of shears, except there are flat padded mini-blocks where the sharp blades would be. It cost a dollar, and since I derived at least a dollar’s worth of fun from using it to pick up and wave other items at Jen during that particular yard sale, I decided to purchase it. It’s living above my doorway right now, but I suspect it’s going to work with me on Monday – imagine the fun we’ll have with it during my upcoming performance review!

Jen has asked if I might now be regular yard sale devotee. There remains a bookcase need, and I did get a kick out of joining Jen in the evaluation process. (“1.50 for THAT? I don’t THINK so!”) Most fun of all, though, was imagining holding my own yard sale. Is there a market, do you think, for scarves from the 80’s (remember the floppy bow?  - so  does my closet), high school marching band sheet music, or my neighbor’s childhood memorabilia? ( I should mention I share a basement with my upstairs neighbour, who maintains teeth-gritting  piles of clutter in our common area. There’s a Thigh Master down there, for God’s sake – if you actually bought it, have enough shame to get rid of it!) So perhaps I can coax Jen into another foray next Saturday – as a purely educational endeavour – assuming Kelley lets her come.

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