Our neighborhood held their annual yard sale yesterday. Why I participate in these things I don’t know. Seriously, it’s so much work and takes up your ENTIRE Saturday…is it really worth it? I suppose the $183.15 sitting in my “Holly’s Savings” envelope says it was. And we’re moving. And I’m a clutter-phobe anyway, so a yard sale is just a way to profit (literally) from my quirkiness.
All I can say is, mom, I now know why you balked at our cries to have “yard sales” (a.k.a. us kids trying to sell our stuffed animals for pennies in the driveway of our less-than-well-traveled street). They are a bunch of work! But, like all things worth doing, after the fact we can all breathe a sigh of relief and whisper to ourselves, “I guess it wasn’t that bad.” My mother used to say that God makes you forget the pain of childbirth, otherwise, you’d never have another kid. I think that’s true of yard sales, too. Otherwise, there would be no “annual.” There would be once.
But before we get to yesterday’s day-long money-maker, here is this:
Heather and my Friday night post-yard sale prep feast while watching Beaches. I’d never seen the movie and it’s a favorite of Heather’s, and very appropriate (a tale of deep friendship and loss–the friendship part, not the loss part, unless you count moving), so we popped that in after organizing, cleaning and pricing our junk in the garage.
We enjoyed wine (Muscato), hummus, figs, orange-flavored dark chocolate, goat cheese and crackers. And wavy Lays and french onion dip. We’re high class like that. Seriously though, it must have been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a good chip and dip. They weren’t kidding when they said you can’t have just one!
As usual, Heather fell asleep about half-way through, but I stayed up until the bitter end (literally and in the movie), shed a few tears and then cleaned up our mess.
The next morning, we were up at 6 a.m., enjoying coffee and Bible study together by 7 and out moving our wares to the driveway by 8.
Our hard work the night before paid off; we had everything set-up with more than enough time to spare! (A miracle in and of itself, really.)
We plopped down on some camping chairs armed with loose change, water bottles, a notebook and our Bible studies (that didn’t really get done, but a valiant effort).
Margaret did incredibly well and only shed a few tears as yard-salers started picking through her toys. Only one item was “un-yard-saled” (a purple bouncy ball) and brought back into the garage.
Hi Margaret!
We were blessed with great weather and all our big items went to new homes. We called it quits around 4 p.m. and donated our leftovers to a Susy, who is having a yard sale to benefit Team In Training.
And then, after dinners, putting the youngster to bed and taking Hadrian on a nice, long walk, we did what Heather and I usually do to celebrate no small achievement: we grabbed the remainder of our Muscato, heated up some spinach and artichoke dip, grabbed the blue corn tortilla chips, some Ritter’s dark chocolate with marzipan (a huge hit, by the way) and popped in a movie. And, as usual, Heather didn’t quite make it to the end.
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