Open for Business
Did someone declare last Saturday Official Yard Sale Day?
No doubt about it, summer’s public marketplace otherwise known as the roadside is open for business. Though it’s not even August yet, yard sale activity has launched full throttle. As Bob and I wound our way down to Boothbay Harbor, we found evidence on every roadway, including the island’s own Route 15. Indeed, given the plethora of hand-written signs – whether tacked to utility poles, pounded into the ground at important intersections, or wired onto Stop signs (definitely adding a more emphatic directive for would-be shoppers to “hit the brakes”) and whether hand-painted, stenciled, or artistically rendered in multiple colors – yard sales seem to be striving for near epidemic proportions.
Clearly, as the effects of the Great Recession linger, there may well be economic reasons behind this seeming influx. Perhaps it offers proof that as a consumer driven society, we’re all sinking beneath the weight of too much stuff. For some, this is likely a mere matter of recreation, though I suspect that surely, in some households, a summer past-time of cruising a few local yard sales may have evolved into a competitive, or, possibly in the case of early birds, a combative sport. Whatever the reason, yard sales are a sure indicator that peak summer has arrived.
More than to the long-standing establishments with clever “If We Ain’t Got It, You Don’t Need It” signage and a wide – often very wide – range of merchandise that attract customers to their doors, yard sales are more directly linked to the myriad enterprises that annually sprout up on lawns, in garages, on driveways, or at curbside. Here on the island and peninsula, we all drive by them on a regular basis – seasonal stands of camp wood or zinnia bouquets, run-from-home operations offering picked crabmeat or Adirondack-style lawn furniture. Gone, sadly, are the island “pie ladies” who once set up shop from their cars parked beneath a shady tree. Or my neighbor down the road who sold whoopee pies and doughnuts from a small umbrellaed table in her yard, but two summers ago made good on her pledge that she was “this time, and for sure, retired.”
Fortunate for all of us is the increasing number of farm stands popping up along our roads. Once, options were few. At Grandview Farm just over the bridge, the former owner informed us daily via shorthand on his roadside chalkboard what was in season. “Cukes and Glads”needed little explanation then, but, I wonder, does anyone grow gladioli anymore? Not so clear a communication resided at the island spot where you can still get your chairs caned or upholstered but now can also buy caught-the-same-day lobsters and made-on-the-premises goat cheese. There, for a few years, the large decal on the local fisherman owner’s delivery truck read “Bandit and the Bitch,” prompting a visiting grandson to ask, “Is that some kind of rock band?”
Here, as is the case elsewhere, somebody’s cast-offs are someone else’s finds. But maybe this is especially true for islanders, a throwback to leaner times and days when pre-bridge transport to the island wasn’t so easy, when the life cycles of commodities increased triplefold because they had to. When being frugal and inventive was required and it was imperative to consider that in one’s possessions there may well be another use just waiting to show itself. Such ingrained recognitions may help explain the chockablock barns, garages, attics and cellars or, of the not so tidy, the dooryards heaped with what, if you’re tempted to call it “junk,” you do so at your own peril. Maybe, too, it also points to the popularity of our Take It or Leave It shed at the island dump, or as it’s officially known, the Transfer Station. Transfer not only inviting my metaphorical musings but suggesting that what was mine may now be yours, one giant loop of give-and-take, use and re-use, and a much nicer notion surely than heaps of dumped chemicals and plastics that no one wants and do not break down and increasingly find their way into oceans or engorge landfills, those pieces of earth that might otherwise have been an open field, a park, a bird sanctuary.
Each year, in the beehive of enterprising roadside activity, I find evidence of ingenuity, talent, and necessity but also a reassuring sign that summer weeks are yet to come. Too soon, I know, signaling another season’s end, a plank of plywood spray-painted “We Shrink Wrap” will again be erected in the yard of a white clapboard house and storage building just outside the village and beside it, as proof, a trailered boat with tightly-wrapped hull. About then, too, after all recipes have been exhausted – or possibly when more than a few islanders sit down to their dinner tables and ask of whomever does the cooking, “So in what did you try to hide the zucchini this time?”—card tables heaped with fat zucchini logs will appear in driveways. No signs are required. That they’re free for the taking is universally – well, almost – understood.
Soon after, card tables will be stowed, possibly out back or down cellar, along with all our myriad possessions, some of which may be poised for re-invention, some new purpose that has yet to reveal itself, and joining perhaps the new, burgeoning pile of candidates some of us will haul out to the yard when the roadside calendar of sell-swap-donate-give away announces that once again another summer has arrived.