Hi Blog Fans! Sorry I’m late with today’s post. I hope that you weren’t worried about me. Do you remember the Barbara Mandrell song, “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool’? Well, “I Was a Picker When Pickin’ Wasn’t Cool.” I was out exploring a neighborhood garage sale today and it was great! Over a decade ago, I had an eBay store that was mostly filled with my “pickins”. I’ve always had a good eye for the rare and unusual and I love rummaging through stuff.
I don’t enjoy “vintage” sales as much as I used to, though. There are too many other people in on the game now, due to shows like “Pawn Stars”, “Storage Wars” and “American Pickers”. The scene gets a little vulture-like and it makes it hard to concentrate. I never felt comfortable with estate sales for that reason. It made me sad to act like a bunch of hyenas scouring someone’s whole house/whole life that they had to leave due to infirmity or passing on. It always felt disrespectful to me.
You can tell a lot about people from garage sales and what they are selling. I got intrigued to go to this particular sale because a “marquis” house in the neighborhood had been advertising the upcoming sale in their yard, for a few weeks. Their house looks other-worldly, like it was dropped down from the sky from an exotic Asian jungle or South Africa, or something. True to form, everything they had for sale looked like a cool ancient artifact or a prop from an Indiana Jones movie.
Garage sales allow you a real glimpse into a family’s life. You can predict their ages, what their house decorations look like, how many kids they have and what sexes and ages the of kids are, what sports they are into and what they like to read. You get an all-around idea about their tastes in life. It’s like old-fashioned Pinterest.
Like I said, I haven’t been perusing the rummage sales and flea markets like I used to do. I don’t have an eBay store any longer and I have more stuff than I know what to do with. Still it was a very brisk morning for Florida (55 degrees), so it felt like a good day for a walk in the cold, clean air, chatting it up with local people and doing a little treasure hunting. We Floridians are not used to the cold, so there was a lot of complaining, a lot of people looking for cheap sweaters and even some fires and space heaters set up. So funny!
Anyway, this was a fun “blast from the past” morning for me. It was nice to be outside exploring other people’s “insides” and getting ideas and feeling more connected to the people who live right around the corner. Garage sales are like a tiny microcosm of people’s lives, so I consider it to be anthropological to explore them. Or maybe, it’s just fun!