Our Connected Lives

Wherein I romanticize yard sales and entreat you to do the same

Still Life by somebody’s grandmother

It is block sale season where I live, which means that on Saturday mornings, as the sun is just peeking up above the horizon and the air is still fresh and cold and dewey, the neighbors brew their coffee and set out tables and sheets and lay out things they no longer want or need. It is a late-spring ritual, a community event. We too brew our coffee, sit around and drink it as the sun begins to rise, and then go out to look, to see. We see tables of odds and ends— books, clothes, kitchen things, knick-knacks, and art. It is like a museum of ordinary life. It is like the houses are turned inside out and all our probing window gazer wishes are granted, at least in part, for we see the person and the things, the life and its consequent object. And though most of the year I try to avoid accumulation, at this time I go all wild-eyed treasure-hunter. I scan for things that call out to me, things that might still be adored, things with stories left to tell. And I am never disappointed. My neighbors are lovely, standing proudly behind their wares, pulling knit-sweaters tighter around cold bodies on those chilly mornings, smiling with sleepy eyes, having the chat, giving the hard-sell. I love the whole experience of it. My mom and sister (best treasure-hunting companions) and I make the walk back home with armfuls of our neighbors’ things. We read the books they’ve read, pour lemonade out of their pitchers, wrap their sweaters around our own shoulders, plant their cuttings in our own gardens. We trade things, pass them down, we are connected. Of course this is a very romantic way of looking at it, but indulge me. Try to see it this way. See how the objects are not merely objects. See how they are playing host to the story of our connected lives.

If my materialism gets out of hand in the spring, I am at least glad that it does so in the name of handmade items and ancient oddities. I don’t want something from Target, cheaply and recently made for my momentary enjoyment. I want the wooden cat hand-carved by the neighbor’s great grandmother. I want the mysterious yellow drawing Andrea’s sister made in 1992, man in a checked hat, boy in a coat, woman with a teardrop-shaped earring. I want to read the out-of-print book of unsent letters by William Saroyan, the Diane Keaton memoir with water-warped pages. And the oil painting! I adore this one. My neighbor said her mother painted it, or maybe her grandmother painted it as a gift to her mother, and it used to hang on the kitchen wall when she was a small girl, and there it was leaned against her house with a $10 sticker, and now it is up on my wall in the bedroom that gets the glowy evening light. And I am not on trend in the vintage velvet dress that falls around me like a tent and feels vaguely “colonial boy”, nor in the hand knitted cross between a sweater and a shirt in a bright sky blue, but I feel well in them. They have a story. I have a story. We get each other. I can’t neglect to mention the solid wood wardrobe painted yellow. I think of it as what the portal to Narnia would look like if Digory Kirke had lived in the south of France rather than London.

Some of the things I find are entirely unexpected, I couldn’t have dreamt them up if I’d tried, like the Spanish hand-painted vases with male and female deer that I fell immediately in love with. Other things seem to strangely materialize just for me, like this copy of the DuMaurier book I listened to and wrote about last June, or the proofing basket a week after I started making sourdough, or the hojalata mirror with its birds and sun that was begging to hang next to the collages I made using cut out images of hojalata birds and sun.

Now the mornings are getting warmer, block sale season is coming to an end, my old things that I’ve sold or given away have gone off to live new lives with other people, and my springtime treasures add fresh pleasure to my summertime days.

a recent painting of mine in a $2 yard sale frame

What found object have you given new life to lately? As always, I’d love to hear about it.