As we drove up to the sale itself, I could tell we would be there awhile. There were some kids clothes, but it appeared to be 95% books. There was a tall, wide bookshelf and then another six packing boxes on the ground. Books take a little longer to poke through than most things. Also, Josh likes to be very thorough when looking through them. Since I've been taking him to yard sales, most of what he's bought has been books.
As I poked through the titles, I looked for a common thread. You can get a glimpse into someone's personality by the books they read. These were all over the place. There were cookbooks, a couple of classics, some recent Oprah book club novels, some popular thrillers, a pair of weight loss books, some religious and anti-religious texts, and a few really old ones. I wondered if these people had owned a book shop at one point.
"Did you guys own a shop or something?" I asked the man as I pulled out a stack of books from a box.
"No," he laughed. "My wife is just a bibliophile. We probably could open a shop just with what she has."
I finished looking before Josh did and stood in the sunshine. There aren't a lot of yard sales in February, but the weather was so nice out that we had decided to see what we might find. I'd already spent $3.75 at a pair of previous sales and had a quarter left in my pocket, though Josh said he had some cash. My big find of the day was a homemade xylophone that I was thinking would look great hung up on the wall somewhere. I'd also bought a 1987 NC State sweatshirt, a deck of French playing cards for my brother, a bad sci-fi movie, a box of mismatched old greeting cards, a large silver picture frame, and a pair of earrings.
"Do you guys go to yard sales often?" the man asked as his wife worked at taking some of the boxed books and putting them on the shelves.
"Every Saturday when it's warm," I answered.
"Do you look for anything in particular?"
"Not really," I shrugged. "I have friends and family members who will tell me to be on the lookout for some stuff, but mostly we're just looking around."
He nodded in understanding. "Yeah, we used to go every week, too. We try not to buy anything retail. If we can avoid it."
I was pleasantly surprised. Most people that I meet find my hobby odd. To meet some hard core secondhanders out in the wild was something new. I felt a warm kinship between us. I realized that they had a ton of books because when books cost under a buck apiece, it's hard not to grab every thing that might interest you. A lot of those books were probably bought at other yard sales and now they were being sold the same way. It was like a yard sale catch-and-release program. These people understood that the lifetimes of things did not end when you were done with them.
We picked out five books, four hardbacks and a paperback. According to the prices quoted to us when we arrived, that should have put us back $4.50. But she asked for $1.50, which we happily paid, using up my last quarter. I knew we were getting the secondhanders discount. I got back into the car with my $4 yard sale budget completely gone, but I was happy. The sun was out, I had a homemade xylophone, and there were other people in the world who thought there was no better way to spend a Saturday morning than looking through other people's crap.
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