Yard Sale Table

Yard-Sale Table

This weekend, my sister and I had a yard sale, so we were up before sunrise on Saturday morning to greet the early birds, who were there at dawn. Even though the sale didn’t officially start until eight o’clock, everyone who has ever held a yard sale knows that time means nothing to people on the hunt.

And fervent they were, hungry as rabbits in an arugula patch. Looking for stuffstuffstuff and stuffstuffstuff was what we had. I wondered as I wandered around my house last week how I have ever managed to accumulate so much and took a merciless, grim-faced joy in tossing things into boxes and shopping bags to take to my sister’s yard and hopefully, never see again.

But I must admit that when one of the hunters stood across the card table from me with a handful of quarters and tight-fisted dollars, ready to buy the fireplace screen from my long past married chapter or a book I bought in England thirty years ago about herbs or the long-legged fabric angel I won in a Yankee Swap or the wooden Jamaican vase that’s collected dust in the cabinet for ages or the Mexican tiles from an 80’s trip to Puerto Vallarta and never used, I felt a twinge in my heart, a last-second misgiving, and wanted to snatch the item back and say, “I’m sorry. I was wrong. There’s a mistake here. You can’t have it!”

And that night, I woke up around two o’clock, the ghosts of apartments and houses and all their furnishings, all their rooms swirling in my mind, the memories piling up like the empty cardboard boxes tumbled under the day’s tables. There is space now in the attic, the cellar, the bookshelves, the closets, and that’s good, I know that’s good, but there is an emptiness in my heart when I wonder where that long-legged Yankee Swap angel is now or the Martha Stewart hors d’oeuvres cookbook inscribed by a friend long gone, or the tennis racket that can tell a whole love story…but only to me.

Maybe that’s why stuff matters, maybe that’s why we’re all, in varying degrees, hunters and hoarders alike.