Memorial Day is exciting to me for primarily one reason: the yard sale. I’m sure it stems partially from my passion for reuse and this weird peasant ancestry that makes me stockpile empty glass jars and fabric scraps in my basement, etc. But I’m also pretty nosy, and I get creepy amounts of pleasure from rooting through other people’s cast-offs. When I used to stay with my grandmother in the summertime we would take walks on the evenings before
trash day, and we always came home with a lamp or a footstool or something. The trash-picking didn’t have to do so much with poverty, but rather with preservation: a perfectly good kitchen table should not end up at the dump. So, thanks to my grandmother (and my grandfather, who often took me to the junk yard) I’ve inherited a disproportionate amount of Depression Era philosophies.
Living in a relatively small space has tempered my hoarding instinct a bit, though it has not done much to lessen my neighborly curiosity. So Memorial Day weekend is like going on a museum tour, where each stop contains the edited outcasts from each family’s home. And while I would have some interest in seeing the inside of the homes all put together and finalized-like, that’s just too direct for me. I guess I prefer to analyze clues and make up my own stories.
Lucky for me, Landisville, PA hosts a yearly flea market/community yard sale that is extremely worthwhile, both in terms of quantity and quality of junk to sort through. It features the expected flea market fare: Pyrex dishes, baseball cards, tea tins, flour sacks, etc. And while I’m not interested in buying any of those things, I do enjoy the parade of Americana; all the stuff that people want to obtain to give their houses some kind of character. The more local vendors will have old photo albums and quilt remnants, signage from now-abandoned factories—generally, things that make me feel like the present is a rather flimsy time period. I mean, I doubt anyone will be able to make any kind of use of my clothes 50 years from now. And will there ever be some kind of museum of early internet advertisements? Will graphic designers ever be in the same occupational category as tinsmiths? I guess my really grandiose question here is: how will the present be used in the future? The more technological, the more virtual or whatever, the less I’ll be able to dig through a box of it in someone’s front yard.
Regardless of whatever crisis/non-crisis we might be approaching, Lancaster County’s enthusiasm for the yard sale does not yet seem to be waning. People were eating hotdogs and hamburgers from the concession stand (there was a concession stand) at 9am. Zillions of cars parked in orderly fashion under the direction of bright-green-t-shirted men. Kids being pulled around in red wagons eating ice cream. I’m not sure what all these folks were buying, if anything (I bought some old woman’s hand-woven rug), but at least they were out there—some even with expressions of total ecstasy. See below.
trash day, and we always came home with a lamp or a footstool or something. The trash-picking didn’t have to do so much with poverty, but rather with preservation: a perfectly good kitchen table should not end up at the dump. So, thanks to my grandmother (and my grandfather, who often took me to the junk yard) I’ve inherited a disproportionate amount of Depression Era philosophies.Living in a relatively small space has tempered my hoarding instinct a bit, though it has not done much to lessen my neighborly curiosity. So Memorial Day weekend is like going on a museum tour, where each stop contains the edited outcasts from each family’s home. And while I would have some interest in seeing the inside of the homes all put together and finalized-like, that’s just too direct for me. I guess I prefer to analyze clues and make up my own stories.
Lucky for me, Landisville, PA hosts a yearly flea market/community yard sale that is extremely worthwhile, both in terms of quantity and quality of junk to sort through. It features the expected flea market fare: Pyrex dishes, baseball cards, tea tins, flour sacks, etc. And while I’m not interested in buying any of those things, I do enjoy the parade of Americana; all the stuff that people want to obtain to give their houses some kind of character. The more local vendors will have old photo albums and quilt remnants, signage from now-abandoned factories—generally, things that make me feel like the present is a rather flimsy time period. I mean, I doubt anyone will be able to make any kind of use of my clothes 50 years from now. And will there ever be some kind of museum of early internet advertisements? Will graphic designers ever be in the same occupational category as tinsmiths? I guess my really grandiose question here is: how will the present be used in the future? The more technological, the more virtual or whatever, the less I’ll be able to dig through a box of it in someone’s front yard.
Regardless of whatever crisis/non-crisis we might be approaching, Lancaster County’s enthusiasm for the yard sale does not yet seem to be waning. People were eating hotdogs and hamburgers from the concession stand (there was a concession stand) at 9am. Zillions of cars parked in orderly fashion under the direction of bright-green-t-shirted men. Kids being pulled around in red wagons eating ice cream. I’m not sure what all these folks were buying, if anything (I bought some old woman’s hand-woven rug), but at least they were out there—some even with expressions of total ecstasy. See below.
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