About twelve hours ago, my eyes popped open from a long night’s sleep. Ordinarily when this happens on a Saturday, the first light of day brings a sence of euphoria, the thrill of possibility. But today, the first murky strands of thought were of impending doom, of grave foreboding. For, today was...Yardsale Day. Of course, by the time I awoke, Pam had already been up for an hour planning...strategizing, plotting out her steps. She had already struck several items off of her To-Do List, affixed to her game-day clipboard. She shot me a piercing side eye as I trudged down the stairs for my morning coffee, already disappointed with my inadequate sence of urgency. She had already placed our bagel order with the Mechanicsville Panera and we needed to be there at 6:45 sharp to pick it up..and she was not enthused with my lollygagging. Despite her early concerns, I rallied and we made it to Panera with 30 seconds to spare.
The same could not be said for the rest of the set up crew. When we pulled into the driveway at ground zero, only Ron was there. At 6:55, we only had 15 minutes to get 17 fully loaded tables out of the garage and into place before the early worms started stumbling, ghost-like out of the Mechancisville mist like a pack of bargain hunting zombies. Apparently, two of our crew had overslept...having not heard their alarm. Another had fallen victim to that rarest of all occurrences...the 7 am traffic backup on 295. Still another when she arrived, reminded us that she is not a morning person. An inauspicious and uninspired beginning.
But before you could say...What in the Sam Hill is going on around here?....the floor displays were all in place and the first of a nearly five hour wave of shoppers had descended on the place. They proceeded to pick over our merchandise like hungry jackals.
Every year there’s this one item that baffles us all. Where did it come from? What the heck is it? Surely, nobody is going to pay real money for this, right? This...thing...is this year’s item. How to describe? It sort of looks like an attempt at a honey comb, or bee hive, maybe? It is festooned with an array of shiny little yellowish pieces of faux diamond knock offs. But, upon closer inspection, there appears to be a face at the top, the little pink ball nose of either a cat or a bunny, with darker pink eyes. Whatever this creature is supposed to be...he/she is carrying some sort of flower basket without the benefit of any discernible appendages. Adding to the mystery, the creature’s insides have been hollowed out in order to hold a string of Christmas lights, which, once stuffed inside, make it glow brilliantly, as if he/she had just eaten some radioactive gruhl. Well, I’ll have you know that somebody did pay real money for it. She even asked us to plug in the string of lights to make sure they worked...as if this was crucial to her decision. When the lights flashed, she was sold!!
To make this story complete, I must reveal that at the time of sale we discovered that the creature had...a hat. This piece of the ensemble added nothing to our understanding of what had just happened as we watched this delighted customer leave with her treasure.
Then there was this.
Ok, my sainted mother used to have this wall clock which every hour on the hour would emit the shrill call of a different bird. It always freaked me out whenever I was over there for lunch and that dreadful hoot owl would scare the crap out of me at noon with his entirely too loud and synthesized HOOOOOT. I couldn’t imagine any wall clock being worse than the Hitchcockian nightmare that hung in my Mom’s kitchen....until I was introduced to...Divine Time. This beauty, which comes with handy, glow in the dark minute and hour hands, and speaks two different languages, features the booming voice of the spoken word belting out passages of scripture to herald the arrival of each new hour. It is described as the Scripture reading time piece, which is misleading and, in fact, not true at all. This plastic clock with bonus fake wood stand does not read anything. It bellows out prerecorded scripture every hour, all through the night when most people are trying to, you know...sleep. But, before I could wrap my head around the existence of such a thing in our universe, it had vanished, scarfed up by an eager Spanish-speaking woman...
...the fastest two bucks we’ve ever made.
Of course, no yard sale would be complete without a few mishaps. Early on, I heard the faint sound of breaking glass, but by the time I made it over to the scene, the customers had disappeared. Clean up on aisle three!! A little mercury poisoning never hurt anybody!
At the Dunnevant Yardsale, even our plastic bags are organized and neatly folded...
One of our youngest family members was given cash register duties this year and performed like a champ. She was exposed to enough give and take, hustle and bustle, and wheeling and dealing to last her a lifetime. She was a natural. I can actually see her becoming a trader in the pit on Wall Street one day. This particular customer doesn’t appear convinced, however. Her side eye suggests that perhaps she thinks we should have a more experienced huckster at the register. To which I say...Well, how is the next generation going to learn how to make money selling worthless junk to the public unless we give them a chance? We can’t all work at Walmart, you know!
They kept coming. In long, relentless lines, they came. Even when we were tearing everything down and packing it all up for a run to GoodWill and then the dump...they still came, one dude paid us six bucks for a bag of crap that was in the going to the dump pile not fifteen minutes before we were about to leave.
We even got a van load of church ladies who all wore orange t-shirt uniforms on a day trip from beautiful, down town Hayensville.
They were on a mission, their leader told me...a mission from God.
Well, I said, have I got a wall clock for you!!!
And just like that...it was over. The numbers are still a bit murky at this hour, but the estimate is that we netted somewhere between $850 and $1050.
God. Bless. America.
