Last Saturday, I had a yard sale. Now, this experience is probably not as unique to most of you as it is to me; I haven’t done one in years. I was sort of apprehensive about it, meeting new people, tallying purchases properly (I’m no slouch at math, but if I’m nervous, who knows?), and being able to communicate with my customers (my neighborhood is heavily Spanish-speaking).
I had a lot of reasons for doing this sale, however, enough to make me overcome this apprehension. First, I have WAY too much junk. Junk can stress you out. Just dusting, arranging, or putting away junk seems to be an huge waste of time in my finite life. So I wanted to downsize.
Not only do I have a plethora of my own junk (I want to use another word here, but it might bring down my grade), but I have also inherited a lifetime of junk from my father-in-law. Hence, the decision to get out and flog some items.
It didn’t go badly. Useful stuff like tools was pretty big, probably because I live in a working-class neighborhood. Much of the decorative “vintage” stuff was swept up first thing in the morning by the nutty collectors. They were diving into my boxes before I had a chance to unpack them. Speaking of whom, I put my sale in the paper, and people were banging on the door the day before asking to look at my items. NOT. Does collecting = heroin addiction?
In the end, I made 120 bucks working from 7 a.m. to 12 p.m.. That’s over 20 bucks an hour keeping stuff out of a landfill. Not a librarian’s wage, but not bad for sitting in a chair, collecting money, and having people help me improve my Spanish. The best part was the joy I saw on people’s faces when they thought they found a treasure. Didn’t George Carlin say something about one man’s junk (actually, he used a four letter word starting with “s”) being another man’s stuff? The guy who excitedly grabbed my bent-up old sport blocks and handed me five bucks, the Mom who locked up her brakes in the middle of the road and made her kid run up and buy 4 red vases, or even the funny Grandma who bought her very cute grandaughter an apron with the words, “We like to start ’em out working early.” Overall, it wasn’t as fun as watching Frasier on T.V. or reading, or playing a video game. But it paid more.
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