Garage Sale Widow

It’s 7:45 on Saturday morning. Do you know where your husband is?

I know where mine is. He’s at a 20-family garage sale. I can picture him. Right now he’s either trolling down some residential cul-de-sac at 5 miles an hour, peering through the windows of our SUV and trying to decide if he sees anything worth stopping for. Or, he’s got his baseball-capped head submerged in a box of records; or he’s sifting through a pile of clothes marked “$1 per item” (lucky me, it’s almost Christmas.)

There are a lot of benefits to having a junk-a-holic for a spouse. I have some beautiful vintage pins, a new stainless steel crock pot, a set of Bauer nesting mixing bowls, a vintage metal woodpecker that picks up toothpicks, and an oil painting of a blue robin's egg with a string of pearls. Our home decor is totally Anthropoligie vintage, only it's the real thing, not made in India and about one twelfth the price. I have some wonderful furniture that was incredibly inexpensive and that you won't find in any one else's house because it really is unique. My kids have My Little Pony, Barbie and Strawberry Shortcake dollhouses galore -- for cheap -- which is wonderful because they are the kind of bulky toys that get played with for six months and then take up way too much closet space.

The downsides: well, I'm home alone with the kids this morning, and Hubby left without his cell phone. I don't know when he'll be back. But what I do know is he'll be back with boxes full of stuff, which he'll spend lots of time today cleaning, sorting, gloating over. Our house is not big, but it houses lots of vintage treasures: under the bed, under the dresser, in the laundry room, and often on the kitchen floor. It's annoying, I'll be honest with you. Possibly most annoying, I'm usually allowed to keep his findings mainly when they are not valuable: like the chipped pottery too flawed for the true collector.

But Hubby truly is a champion garage-saler. He has an eye for the things that are actually valuable and turns it into profit on e-bay, Craig's list and at flea markets. Even items he's never heard of -- like the Lawnware plastic pots he bought that turned out to be a cult -item among the RV set -- he somehow can pluck from among the detritus of suburban clutter and see the potential. His endurance is unparalleled; sometimes it's only siren-level whining by both kids and myself that can make him stop.

And, bizzarley, it brings him a lot of joy. So, I support this passion. Look, Lance Armstrong's bride has to put up with a lot to be married to excellence and so do I.

Miracle in the Trash Bin

Here goes my last shred of dignity: I'm making money off my neighbor's trash.

If you are one of my neighbor's, kindly stop reading now.

In our condo complex, we have a community dumpster, and within the trash enclosure we often find goodies. And I mean really good goodies.

Here's a list of just what I can remember:

1. a teak floor lamp
2. a man's beach cruiser bicycle, missing the seat
3. a Weber barbecue, with plastic cover
4. a folding bookcase
5. a Mission style, solid wood end table
6. a folding cart used to shop at flea markets (more on this in later blogs)
7. three metal Tonka trucks, the big vintage kind
8. a child's wooden school desk
9. a power jigsaw

I'm not sure why these things are placed here. It's actually against our association rules (along with lots and lots of other things) to leave things outside of the dumpster. But I assume it is a kind of slacker generosity. Too lazy to sell the items or donate them to a tax-deductible charity, the neighbors instead offer them to the men who occasionally troll the neighborhood with a pickup truck loaded with used items. Little do they know, they actually are donating them to the Keep Amanda Home with Her Children Fund. Most of these things my husband and I have dragged into our patio under the cover of suburban semi-darkness, listed them on Craig's List, and sold them for cash within three days.

I feel slightly guilty when the buyers call.

"Is it in good condition?" they ask.

"Yes," I honestly answer. But I wonder what they'd think if they knew, had they been in my trash enclosure 24 hours earlier, their new barbecue grill would have cost them nothing but their pride.

Only twice has this practice of ours actually been truly embarrassing. Once was when my daughter's friend saw the school desk in our backyard, and said, "Hey, my sister threw that in the trash yesterday." The other was when our next door neighbor looked quizzically at my husband as he rolled by on the beach cruiser -- seat now replaced. Apparently, it was his old bike.

Perhaps my mind works a little abnormally, but I can't help but feel blessed beyond measure by my garbage. In the last year, the ten households that use our dumpster have thrown away nicer things than most people in the world have ever owned. And since we are, like most single-income families these days, are on a tight budget, we resell items on e-bay and Craig's list to help make ends meet.

My six year old recently asked me, "Why are you pulling things out of the trash?" and I answered, bizarrely but truthfully, "Because God is providing for us in the dumpster." It's almost eerie sometimes. One day, Hubby and I had discussed a part we needed to fix our upstairs toilet (in a month that our "home improvement" line in the budget was already full), and the next day, we found the exact part, still in the packaging, sitting next to the trash. So I guess I'll take bizarre minor miracles over dignity any day.