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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. 

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