To Garage Sales

“I don’t want this anymore, but maybe someone else would.” Say that to yourself enough times, and then you decide to have a garage sale. 

 

So you clean the things up a bit; you wash the Cuisinart with the missing blade, wipe down the old baby johnny jump-up, gather all the sheet sets in (close enough) matching piles and even tie them together with a little string. You dust off the painting your uncle gave when he moved and you were getting your first apartment. It’s a tree. Some clouds. The thin canvass board pulls away from the frame.

By The original uploader was Jimmyjazz at English Wikipedia
(Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

 In the morning, you have to lay out your little home store of sorts and you group like items: kitchen things here, yard tools here, a box of old textbooks. Clouds suggest it might rain, but you’ve been planning this so you pretend not to see them. You run a few signs around the neighborhood and grab a cup of coffee.

 

Always, the early birds. Though your sign says 9, it’s 8:30. Some stay in their cars, waiting for the signal, but a few go ahead and wander up, pretending they don’t know. One woman wanders from up the block in her print house coat and Sears shuffle slippers. She’s smoking and you want to ask her to put it out but you stop.

She’s picking up glasses and holding them up to the light. You bought them at Target 30 years ago for a party and now you have 3 left. She’s asks if you’ll take 50 cents for them and you say sure and then she remarks they aren’t worth it. She picks up a textbook and thumbs through it. She runs her hand, the one without the cigarette, over the sheets. She runs her hand, the one with the cigarette, across the baby bath.

She sees your birdfeeder and asks if you get a lot of birds. All you can do is watch that cigarette burn and wonder how it is the ashes are still clinging to the burn. Are her moves so small, so slow that they cannot be enough to upset that delicate balance. She says she gets a lot of birds, yellow birds. Little yellow ones, she says. You know, those wild parakeets.

“Those are gold finches,” you say.

“What?” She’s not looking at you. You can hear the cigarette burn as she inhales.

You decide not to correct her. She says she really here looking for a bowl, do you have a bowl? Nothing is right and she keeps lifting up things that are not bowls, studying them.

As she’s walking back, she says, under her breath and only to herself really, “Ah, fuck it” and heads home.

And you decide that morning that, in some way, you want to be her in 20 years. Housecoat and all. Neighbors with their whole past on display that you can just go poke through.

Wild parakeets in your backyard every morning.