Sunday, October 9, 2016

no time left for you

We had another yard sale. This time, we went in a slightly different direction, offering more household items and less items from Mrs. Pincus's eBay store.

After spending the week filling our living room to overflowing capacity with a vast selection of items, we plastered the neighborhood with signs announcing the date and time. Early on Saturday morning, we arranged the stuff on our front lawn and driveway in such a way as to avoid another possible lawsuit. Then we waited for customers,

Meanwhile, our neighbors across the street, set up their own offerings on their lawn, They were the ones who first proposed the idea of a yard sale to my wife a few years ago. Rae dragged a few items down the long walkway that bisects their front lawn. She set a large, plastic storage bin upside down near the sidewalk as an improvised tabletop and placed a few small items on its bumpy surface. She pulled up a folding chair and also waited for customers.

Our lawn soon began to draw a few people whose attention had been distracted as they strolled down our street. However, I glanced across the street to see that Rae was nowhere in sight. Instead, the plastic bin was now filled with the items that once graced its base. A hand-written sign reading "FREE" was taped on the container's side, Rae's yard sale had lasted approximately four minutes... and that was being generous with the time. I imagined that her calendar was marked on this particular Saturday with a five minute block allotted for "YARD SALE" — including set-up time. I'm certainly not faulting her. Some people just don't have the patience for retail.

Or to sit with a lawn full of their shit.

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