Yard Sales

Today Stearns, Ilana and I relived a weekly tradition of our childhood summers: yard sale-ing! We joined our brother, mother, grandmother, aunt (aka the princess of yard sales), cousin, and great aunt (aka the queen of yard sales) in a giant white suburban. Imagine: we pull up to our first yard sale sometime just before 8 a.m. and 9 fully grown people pile out and descend on some unsuspecting house (well, not entirely unsuspecting). One lady looked a little confused and said apologetically, "I don't have enough stuff!"

My aunt navigated the back roads of Williamsport, with my mother shouting directions from the back seat. Our brother was alternately: playing the small wooden whistle that he bought for a dime (on purpose to annoy us), swinging the (admittedly awesome) electronic mosquito killer in the shape of a tennis racket that he bought for a quarter, and tenderizing his and my arm with the massive metal meat tenderizer that my cousin bought for a quarter and with which they both made serious patterns in their arms.

My grandmother typically took the longest--we always had to convince her to come back to the car so we could move on. My mother was happiest, I think, about a set of a dozen scissors that cut your pictures with novelty edges for scrap booking. My great aunt found a small stained glass Dalmatian with a suction cup to stick to a window. Stearns successfully found a huge bag full of clothes that she liked. I found a small gold duck on which to hang keys at Little Gidding, which I love, as well as some small green bowls for ice cream. We were all about ready to scream by the time we arrived back in Newberry to split up and go our separate ways. But I don't really think that you can find entertainment like that anywhere in DC.