Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 23, 1995 TAG: 9507240006
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MAEDLYN ROSENBERG
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
6:45 on a Saturday morning.
Had I ever seen the sun at this particular angle on a weekend?
I spread out my blankets to display my colorful wares.
THEY were already approaching in their long Chryslers and minivans, dogs yapping through open windows, children looking like they were about to suffer through a two-hour lecture on nuclear physics.
THEY were coming to our yard sale. And this wasn't even their first stop of the day.
"Running kinda late, aren't you?" the man in the Kangol hat asked as he started helping me unload one of the boxes.
8 a.m. The ad in the paper said 8 a.m.
My friend, Lisa, peeked out from behind her screen door, her hair slicked back from her morning shower, as her yard filled with strangers. Was that fear or soap in her eyes?
"It's gonna be a hot one," the man quipped, as I tried to remember how to form simple syllables.
"Yes ... it ... is."
"How much for this?"
"Uh ..."
"Hottest day of the year, they say."
"Yes ... very ... hot."
There's nothing that reflects the glory of free enterprise more than a yard sale: People pay good, American currency to cart away the tables and dishes and pots and dolls and lamps and mattresses and toaster ovens that had been stacked precariously in your basement since the Reagan years.
THEY come with discriminating eyes, looking for bargains in a world where it's OK to register sticker-shock on items marked a quarter.
Case in point:
"WHAT?" screeched a woman upon hearing that the dinosaurs from my childhood collection cost 25 cents each. I swear she clutched her chest as she told her little boy to put two of them back.
"Fifty cents?" frowned a man as he flung a nice, Converse bag back to its spot on the lawn. He purchased a small plastic trophy instead.
"Nobody's going for the juicer," mourned my friend, Laura. "You can use it to make celery juice, carrot juice ..."
"Let's buy it," my fiance said, suddenly caught up in the moment.
"But we don't even use our food processor," I said. "And we're trying to get RID of stuff, remember?"
(He didn't remember. The night before, he had asked my mom if he could have some rubber pumpkin thing she was getting rid of, along with a chipped statue of Moses.)
"I was going to buy these earrings, but now there's only one," a woman said as she approached our sales table.
We sighed and waved her on.
"How much for this lid?" a woman asked me.
"If it matches a pot at home, it's free," I said.
Our sale had its rewarding moments: When a pig-tailed girl walked off with a striped hoola hoop, when a father bought his son a pair of cap guns.
But there were moments, too - when the yellow jacket stung my right hand and I figured out my average hourly wage for that day - when I realized that this, my first yard sale, would likely be my last.
Hear that, bargain hunters?
You won't have Madelyn Rosenberg to kick around anymore.
Next weekend, she'll be sleeping late.
by CNB