Yard sale, yard sale, yard sale!

May 19, 2010 at 11:07 am

Anyone who knows me knows I love a good yard sale. The thrill of the hunt, the early morning weekend drive, the voyeuristic pleasure of picking through a stranger’s castoffs, the satisfaction of a score of something I didn’t even know I needed…all good stuff. Sylvie will be schooled in the ways of the scavenger soon enough, and will eventually be chanting “yard sales!” into her sleeping daddy’s ear at sunrise on Saturday mornings. I couldn’t have been more proud when my friend Danielle told me that her daughter Maggie (age 3) forced her daddy up out of bed at 7 a.m., lest he miss all the good stuff to be discovered!

However, sometimes even a scavenger needs to purge the excess, and this was one of those times. We held our own packrat extravaganza on May 1st with our buddy Andrew, and we managed to fill our backyard with a bonanza of stuff we didn’t even remember we had. For four hours, we hung out back there with Sylvie, and she gawked in fascination as people were streaming in, asking us how much things were, and giving her little smiles and waves.

The sale was over at 2:00, but we were having such a good time hanging out in the backyard that we decided to keep the party going with an “Everything’s a dollar fire sale.” We invited our friends Nancy, Chi-Yun, and Luke over, had some beers, and sat back as the babies scampered about the treasure-strewn lawn. At the end of the day, we had a nice relaxing time, came out about $200 richer and a lot lighter. We may just do it again in June!