Good Books and Early Birds

I drove my mom back home last week. She had been making the rounds of her six children's Southern California homes for the last couple of weeks. She did her last stint at our house so that I could drive her back to Prescott, Arizona, where she has lived on and off for the past 25 years. My mom will be 85 in October. She has lived alone since my dad died eight years ago. She doesn't have that serious clutter that many older people have, but she does have enough stuff sitting around to make her begin to think about what will happen when she's gone. So...she wanted me to help her with a garage sale.

You can't get the full effect from this photograph, because you can't see the sides of the garage which were stacked high with more merchandise, but my mom is very organized. When I arrived, I found that she had already moved most of her sale items out to the garage by herself. Some of it was difficult for her, and I don't mean physically. She had decided to part with about 200 books. And, as she must have said a dozen times, "They're good books. I already got rid of all the trashy ones." (And, I admit, some of them were indeed good books. I snagged a really nice copy of Anna Karenina from her. Maybe someday I'll actually read it.)

Some of it was difficult for me. There was the tall wooden Santa that my dad cut out and put together, and which I painted. I admit to being a little relieved when it didn't sell. Some day I'll take a truck over there and bring him home.

Here's the thing about having a garage sale: it is way less fun than going to other people's garage sales. For one thing, it is a lot of work for very little monetary gain. Also, it can be disheartening to watch people paw through stuff that used to have value for you, even if that value has long since faded. And then there are the "early birds." We wrote an ad for the local paper with an opening time of 7 am. We debated about 8:00, but this being Prescott in July, we decided that we'd start early to beat the heat. When we opened the living room blinds at 6:15 there were three cars parked outside. Yikes.

I must say that even though the sale was a bit of a bust there was an upside. I played a lot of cribbage and Scrabble, read through some of those good books, and met some nice people. We boxed up a lot of old stuff. Some local library will get some good reads. And I got to hang out with my mom.