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“I’m not sure why I’m having a garage sale,” I told my niece Shelley over coffee one day. “Most of what we have, we bought second hand, and I’ll be lucky to make $100 for all that work.”
“You don’t do it for the money,” she said with emphasis born of experience. “You have a garage sale because then you get it done! You have a date and time, and it makes you sort through stuff and get rid of it in a way that you never do if you don’t have a deadline.”
She was right.
Three vectors had converged, making a sale necessary. My husband, Paul, and I are now empty nesters, and the closets and pantries of the house are stuffed with extras of everything from cookie sheets to comforters to crayons.
Paul closed his grass-seed cleaning business last November and brought home all the equipment the new renter didn’t want around: augers, an automatic bagger, pallets piled with electric motors, bolts and screws — and the jacks that had lifted our house when it was moved a mile down the road in 1979.
The same weekend that the warehouse was handed over to a nephew’s feed business, our youngest son, Steven, passed away suddenly. We had stored his furniture, books and sports equipment in a side room of the barn, and it was time to disperse them.
We chose August 14 and 15, coinciding with the Harrisburg city-wide sales. As Shelley said, having a date provides incentive. Paul sorted and cleaned pipe fittings and bolts, and I dusted our son’s coffee tables and boxed and priced the cake pans and cutting boards I no longer use.
There’s an uncomfortable vulnerability in hosting a sale, displaying your private possessions and choosing prices. The extra French press liner I bought and never needed, piles of fabric from 20 years ago that never turned into dresses or quilts, and the disturbingly large collections of purses and shoes, a display of my lifelong quest for the perfect bag and the cutest comfortable shoes. Also, how did one family ever accumulate this many books? My acquisitive nature was on full display, as was my pursuit of pretty things to make me happy, my changing tastes and my determination to rescue old things that other people might throw away.
Pricing put me in a dither of indecision. “You could put, ‘3 cents or best offer,’ like Uncle Fred did at Grandpa’s sale,” our son Matt suggested, referencing my brother’s irreverent approach to my parents’ possessions in 2014, when antique buckets and farm tools sported masking tape prices of 67 cents or $2.13.
How do I put a price tag on this little desk where three of my children learned to read and write? Surely it’s worth $100 for the sentimental value alone. But the back of the seat was breaking apart, so maybe $5?
When I saw it later through the eyes of neighbors and random shoppers, I wondered why I put it out for sale at all. Really? A broken-down desk? But I could still see little Jenny there with her red braids, happily working out addition problems on a workbook page. And now she’s a year away from a Ph.D. in math at Virginia Tech, and how do you calculate the value of the little desk where it all began?
Steven’s furniture consisted of a nice gray couch and brown loveseat with lingering whiffs of his gray cat, Tracer; coffee and end tables he bought on Facebook Marketplace; and a giant mirror and end table he was gifted when he helped remodel a motel a few years ago.
We put the mirror on the free pile, along with Paul’s office chair that was structurally sound but whose fake leather upholstery was peeling all over like a teenager’s arms a week after a bad sunburn. No one took them.
Hardest, of course, was the finality of selling our son’s furniture. Thankfully, three of the other kids and two in-laws had come to help, not only hauling and displaying his things but supporting me through the next step in the long process of saying goodbye.
Early on Friday, we hauled and arranged everything in front of our barn. Electric heaters, a lawn mower, a baby carriage. Clothes and books and “so much more,” as the Craigslist ads say. Then, for two days, we sat around the folding plastic cashier’s table, drinking coffee and chatting with each other and with neighbors and passersby who saw our signs and stopped in.
Armloads of our things moved to our table and then into boxes and bags and finally into cars and pickup trucks. Each item that left elicited relief at having our castoffs considered worthy and nostalgia at their departure.
On Saturday evening, we tackled the cleanup, shoving fabric into boxes and filling Steven’s entertainment center with leftover kitchen utensils. Paul stacked it neatly into a trailer and hauled it away to donate to St. Vincent de Paul and Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore, getting it out of my sight before I changed my mind and kept it all.
We made more than $100, thankfully, but not enough to compensate for the time invested. But there are breathing spaces in bedrooms now where accumulations had been and we have moved forward a little bit in the grief process. And most important, as Shelley said, we got it done.
