Skip to main content

Yard Sales

 Summer means yard sale season. I love everything about it. I love the neon-green signs with sharpies and an arrow (time and address optional), I love when there's obnoxious music playing directly from someone's phone speaker, I love listening to people talk. I suspect that the most interesting conversations in the universe happen during yard-sales, something about sitting in fabric camping chairs and watching strangers rummage through your life that shakes stories loose.

 This picture is from a yard-sale that a family of musicians were holding before they moved to Bali to form a jazz band. I admit, I eavesdrop.

 At yard sales, I've seen skateboards, bunnies, entire dining room sets, a marionette puppet, and cumulatively enough graphic tee-shirts to clothe my high school's graduating class twice-over. And I don't even make a hobby of going to yard-sales, I just follow the arrows when I come across them. 

 I think that my favorite part about yard sales is the element of happenstance. Most of the time, I'm just on a walk when I look up and find myself surrounded by cardboard boxes and an older woman ignoring me from her folding chair. Impossible to prepare! I feel like a tourist, I can't help myself from getting just one memento, no matter what. Maybe I will read that copy of the Canterbury Tales... One day. 

Labels:

Comments

  1. SperosDecember 1, 2025 at 10:45 AM

    Hi Zoe, I came upon this blog post while searching for the guitar shown in this image, which I've been looking to buy. Any chance we could DM and you could put me in touch with the family hosting this yard sale? If you have their contact info. Thanks

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Patio

  Where gray polyvinyl chloride meets  Drying strands of grass, like wheat  Which makes no grain, only waves  In sunlit breezes through the day.  Chairs older than my oldest tooth  Wear metal grating wound with roots  From ivys which do not know poison,  Only sweet tea, coffees, the noise one  Makes when they step into the morning  After a night full of dreams like warnings.  The wind chimes snake-rattle, the mint leaves  Attempt infinity, bound in a pot that won't keep.  And the sun loves me here. He sings  To the top of my head, and makes me king.
Post a Comment
Read more

Buying Dinner

 On a day when classes were driving me and my friend crazy, we accidentally spent an entire day together. After doing a little homework, watching in inadvisable amount of TV, and going on a hike, we decided to hop on a bus and go to the fancy neighborhood. On the way, we called another friend and decided to all meet up later, to eat dinner and watch the next episode of X-Men '97.  I love adventures. This adventure was cozy and non-threatening, which is even better. The fancy neighborhood is a little downtown area in the historical district. We joked that we felt European, because the roads are cobblestone and street-lights were wrought-iron. Vines were climbing up buildings in a cute way, not a dilapidated one-- we were living it up!  Fancy neighborhood is also home to one of my favorite stores, a suitably fancy vinegar and oil store. I like going there and asking for lots of samples and not buying anything, so I convinced my friend to go with me. As we should have expect...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bumping into Strangers

 I have a special laugh that I only use when I almost run into a stranger. Usually this happens when I am distractedly leaving a room-- today it was as I left the restroom to go study, because I was thinking about Mr. Rogers and his not-so-secret 143 code. Anyway I love bumping into strangers because it is the perfect everyday amount of embarrassing. I will laugh my bumping-into-strangers-laugh,  she will smile awkwardly, I will apologize, and we both go on our ways. I also love bumping into strangers because it requires that we both stop and make brief eye contact and notice something about each other. Today my stranger had long black hair and smiled mostly without involving her teeth. I would never have noticed this about her if I hadn't almost run her over. I'm trying to invite embarrassment into my life more. Living passionately necessitates humiliation, so I am performing at open-mic nights and making brutal small talk with people whom I've got nothing in common with. ...
Post a Comment
Read more