HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN, JIGGETY JOG

We’re back from our jaunt to Oregon, where we plan to live after I retire in a few years. Yes, I went garaging! It's been a long, long time since I did any garaging in a small town, and it made me realize how smug I had become about it. I suppose that with anything plentiful you begin to take it for granted, to feel entitled to it, and you forget that there are others who don’t have the same access to it. Gasoline. Food. Water. Jobs.

Garage sales.

I found three sales in the southern Oregon town where we spent the weekend with friends. Three. (There may have been others, but I didn’t find them, and no longer know the place well enough to drive around looking. I'm notorious for getting lost.) I've never counted the number of sales I hit in a morning in Orange County, but I went to three in the first ten minutes I was out. So I am trying to remember to hold a feeling of thankfulness for the abundance I have in my life. Garage sales are as good a symbol of that abundance as anything. I have enough to eat, I have a wonderful job that pays the bills and is fun to boot, I turn on a tap and water flows. And I can go out just about any Saturday in the year and find stuff I love on people’s driveways.

The first of the Oregon sales didn’t have anything I wanted, and the lady having it was grumpy to boot. At the second sale I picked up a CD of French horn music, and a DVD of the first season of My Name is Earl. Jason Lee is a stitch, and our friends had not seen the show, so we watched a couple of episodes. They were hooked. We left the DVD with them, telling them to watch it all and then send it on down to us. However, it's going to be making a detour to Alaska first so their son can watch too. That’s a lot of laughs out of a two buck purchase!

At the last sale they were still setting up when I arrived. People were lined up at the end of the drive, waiting. You see this with estate sales sometimes, but rarely with a regular garage sale. But I was in no hurry, so I attached myself to the group. Turns out there were garage-sale factions. The group I was standing nearest was muttering about the others at the far side of the drive, telling me that ‘those people’ were absolutely ruthless and not to get in their way or they’d probably knock me down. I suppose with only three sales in town people might get desperate for deals! But when the sellers said they were ready, there was no mayhem at all; in fact it was a tad anticlimactic. I was hoping for at least some jostling, if not a fistfight or two. We all just started looking at the merchandise and making our selections. I picked up a pair of Fiskars scissors (I keep scissors in almost every room in the house, and recently lost a pair somewhere in the yard). Passed up a baggie full of vintage thread on wooden spools, and the lady who got them was thrilled with her find. I did grab the little card with a sweet little holder for the two tiny handmade candles, and a pin with a couple of cats who remind me of our two (Noll Baxter and Mrs. Wilberforce).

Mrs. W Noll

We got home from Oregon this past Friday night, so Saturday I was out on the trail. It was a good day—not too hot, friendly people, good finds. I spent $7.75 and came home with:

A hand-knit ribbon shawl, just right for when you need a little something around your shoulders. It was twenty five cents. “I just got a divorce,” the lady said, “and this was made by my mother in law.” Nuff said.

A wonderful vintage Carole Little dress. How I wish this fit me! But it's destined for resale. There are a couple of tiny holes in the shoulders, but I think a little black thread will fix that right up.

Three very nice men’s sweaters. When I walked up there were three ladies chatting, and one of them told me that they had decided to call it a day, so if there was anything I wanted to just take it. I picked out one of the sweaters and she said, “That’s my husband’s favorite.” This struck me as a little odd. “Are you mad at him?” I asked. She laughed and said no, he was just ready to clean out his closet of stuff he wasn’t wearing any more. I told her about the trick I read somewhere: hang all your clothes hangers backwards in the closet, and when you wear an item you turn the hanger around. In a few weeks you can tell exactly what you really wear and what you can let go of. She loved it—turns out she’s an image consultant, and one of the things she does is work with clients on their wardrobes. So she said the information was a fair trade for the sweaters.

There was a neighborhood sale at another of the townhome developments, but this one was claustrophobically crowded. The first guy I talked to didn’t have anything I wanted, but we chatted about the two Boston terriers at his screen door. He’d adopted one of them only a month ago from an ad on Craigslist. Apparently the poor thing had been abused; he said it’s afraid of women, and if a woman’s voice on TV gets too loud it goes ballistic. But he seemed determined to hang in and give the pup a good forever home. I love dog rescuers.

The only thing I bought in this neighborhood was this Harley sign.

My brother in law is going to get sick of all this Harley stuff I keep finding. I offered the seller less than he was asking and said I'd give it a good home (a line that rarely fails me). He agreed, then said, “I just wish I'd find a good home for all those Barbie heads.” Okay, maybe he said dolls or clothes, but it sure sounded like heads to me!

Then I moved into the vintage part of the morning. First there was a sale where I picked up a pair of little crocheted hats. From their size I think they must have been intended for dolls, though one of the ladies running the sale said she thought they were for babies. “Babies’ heads used to be smaller,” she assured me. Well, maybe.

I was heading home when I stopped at one more sale and hit the motherlode. I wish I could have spent more time looking, but they were starting to close down, moving boxes into the garage around me as I perused. Still, I managed to come away with these vintage handmade linens (at twenty-five cents each!):

Silk-lined cross stitch mat

Heavy linen cloth with redwork

Cross stitch cloth makes a great Cuisinart cover

Hand stitched wall hanging, about 4 feet long


Small cloth with amazingly tiny cross stitch, and funky vintage cotton for the backing

A lovely old runner

The cloth is frayed, but the ends are beautiful, and I couldn’t leave it there for some ignorant person to trash. Someone gave hours of her life to create this. It deserves some love!

The embroidered nasturtiums on this piece are incredible!

A couple of fabulous jackets to sell

The flowers on the fabric appear to be hand embroidered, and catch that sleeve detail!

The borders on this jacket are mirrors!

A Noritake cup and saucer

And this great little plate from the Twenties or Thirties. English china with a design that includes two auks and some Japanese-influenced flowers.

After a morning like that, you just have to go home and feel grateful!

IT'S A SIN!

Saturday morning was already hot by about eight. Why, you’d think we were in Southern California or something! The sunny side of the street may be where you want to direct your feet most of the time, but when that’s where your garage sale is, your sunscreen had better be SPF 563 or thereabouts. One sale I stopped at was evidently the product of several friends who had pooled their stuff, and one of the sellers was very concerned that she hadn’t worn a tank top. But hey, no problem—she just rummaged through the clothes her friend had brought, found a tank top, and went off to change.

Petted the usual variety of dogs—poodle, golden retriever, small mop-like creature—and the unusual tortoise. Her name was Michelle, she is 12 years old, and the family having the yard sale have had her since she was palm-sized. They put her into hibernation every winter, and said she is the easiest pet they have (others include dogs, ferrets, and bunnies). For a reptile, she was pretty darned charming! (Not that I have anything against reptiles. Bugs, yes; reptiles no.) In fact I was so charmed I never thought of taking her picture until I had driven away (my general modus operandi with a camera, which is why we have almost no vacation pictures).

I'd have needed a video camera to capture the scene at another sale. It appeared to be the efforts of an extended family, lots of stuff, lots of people. I was headed back to my car when a raised voice stopped me. A middle-aged woman jerked a white lace dress off the ground and said loudly, “What are you thinking! Your communion dress? It's a sin!” I loved the pragmatic comeback from another family member: “But when was the last time you wore it?”

My last stop was fun. It was a few blocks away from what struck me as one of the best intersections I've ever encountered: the corner of Suburbia and Theseus.

The sale was at a house with a narrow front yard filled with blooms: roses, Jupiter’s beard, evening primrose, sage, coreopsis. I complimented the people having the sale on their lovely yard, who seemed delighted. They immediately offered me cake and we talked plants while I looked around their sale. One of the two women asked me in a slight German accent if I knew what a particular plant was (the Jupiter’s beard--Centranthus ruber). And when I admired a particular geranium she grabbed some clippers and started giving me cuttings. I ended up with 2 or 3 geraniums and a couple of salvias—hope they take root! If I could remember where her house is, I should take her some of the coleus I got a few years ago at another sale. I was admiring it and the homeowner broke off a couple of pieces, and it has proved to be a great garden-workhorse. It looks different depending on where it's growing, and even blooms in long bright-blue spikes.
Hmmm. I bet I could find her house again. It's near the corner of Suburbia and Theseus.

I spent a total of $9.35, and this is what I got:

A Beatrix Potter bowl, from the family with the teenage boy and the poodle. The mom told me she’d decorated her son’s room totally in Beatrix Potter when he was a baby. He looked a little abashed to have anyone know this.








A small vintage Japanese plate, and a not-so-vintage dinner plate with a cheerful design of oranges.

A couple of nearly-new washcloths with roses, and a dishtowel of colors I like. (I have green tile counters in my kitchen, and this will look good with them.) And this vintage embroidered towel—how could I pass up something that says ‘Saturday’? I'm may try to take a picture of it for a blog header.















These fun paper cutouts—the German lady said when she was a child all the kids collected these.

Some silly/fun dangly earrings, which will be perfect with a dress I thrifted last summer.








A door prize for a future meeting with my children’s librarians, a fun metal picture frame.








And some things to sell (which, BTW, if ever you see something here you’re interested in, send me a message; I'd be perfectly happy not to have to list it on eBay!):

A Sigred Olsen tank top…












Adorable dress from Talbot’s, printed with tiny little veggies!

And this terrific Coach bag. Not sure why anyone would get rid of a Coach bag, because they basically last forever, but garagers don’t ask those questions, we just quietly (well, pretty quietly!) pay and head down the trail to the next sale.




Speaking of heading down the trail…I'll be in Oregon next Saturday. I'll try to go garaging up there but don’t know if that will happen, so I may miss a week blogging. But I'll be back soon!

VARIETY SHOW

Part of my fascination with garage sales is the sheer eclecticism of a morning’s shopping. When you shop in stores, you generally know what you’ll come out with: groceries from the grocery store, clothes from a mall, plants from a nursery. But when you shop on people’s driveways there’s no limit. More than once I've seen things for sale and had no idea what they were (like shrink-wrapped hard drives)—and sometimes the seller didn’t know either. It puts new meaning into the phrase “mystery shopper.” Usually I carry the mystery within me—I start on the treasure hunt not knowing what I'm looking for. But I know it when I see it!

Yesterday I spent $7.50 on this amazingly varied loot:

A rather graceful gold and white teapot. Now that I have three or four of them I can display them together as a collection, right? (For some fun viewing, take a look over at Flickr at pictures of people’s vintage collections.)










A handmade glass vase, bright spring green inside clear glass, with a stripe of white and a thin blue line on each side.



An original piece of art (a leaping frog, in case it's hard to tell!)that looks to be watercolors on an embossed shape. The signature may be G. Jeinya, but Google didn’t turn up anything likely on that name (at least not in any language that I can read).


A large (three quarters of a pound!) bar of daffodil scented soap. I have never seen daffodil scented soap before, and I look forward to smelling like spring.





A vintage-looking Raggedy Ann doll, with an attached hang tag describing the farm the maker lives on and how she and her daughter use old fabrics to make their dolls. I’m not sure why she has a wooden number 5 attached to one hand! Maybe I'll sell her (appears to be pretty collectible) or perhaps she can hang out with the Fall Fairy I got at another sale a couple of years ago (she has silk leaves for wings, and a paintbrush to color the fall foliage, but it was her little beanie hat that endeared her to me).


A pair of cat candles, which seem to belong with this little Halloween box…














…and from the same sale a key ring that I bought for the beaded fob. I've been wanting something fun to hang from the zipper pull on my garaging fanny pack. This one has a snake and a heart and some blue beads, so I should be protected from all kinds of evil. I took it off the key ring to attach it to my bag, and noticed in very small, Gothic lettering engraved on the ring the word “Harley.” Guess my Harley-riding brother-in-law will get another (small!) gift.


Two decorative bookmarks (the silver one dangles four tiny keys with the letters L.O.V.E.). These will be prizes in the summer reading program I run for staff each year.







Finally, a brass gong. I've always wanted a gong, and this is the first one I've seen at a garage sale. I admit I would rather have one without “Tsingtao Beer” on it, but hey, it cost fifty cents. I figure I can either try some paint remover, or just let it weather outside. And it makes a great sound. (Now that I've found a gong, I wonder if another longtime desire will turn up—wind chimes in a very low bass range. The ones I like cost over $500 new—like that’s ever going to happen!)


The little wooden toy from a few weeks ago is now exploring his bear-ness with some garage-sale miniatures. He really gets around.

Favorite overheard conversation yesterday: A young guy, probably in his twenties, asked how much they wanted for a box of ping pong balls. Before the seller could answer, another guy said, “You play ping pong? Are you any good?” The first guy replied modestly that he was. “Here’s my card,” said the other. “I'm going to Vegas tomorrow, but call me when I get back and we’ll play.”

Hope they each found a new best friend.

STINKY TRUCKS, HARLEY GUYS, AND HAPPY BEAGLES

A large pickup truck was rumbling by the curb of my first stop on Saturday, spewing out nasty fumes. I figured it belonged to someone else inspecting this garage sale. Some people simply get out of their vehicles and leave them running, I suppose to facilitate their rushing off to the next sale. It seems counter-productive to me to waste the gas, but perhaps they’re trying to asphyxiate the other garagers and thus keep all the good stuff for themselves.

In this case, however, the truck belonged to the man of the house, and he was letting it run because it is a clunky old truck with an engine that needed warming up. As he drove away I ventured a humorous remark about the ‘stinky truck’ to the lady having the sale. She laughed and shook her head. “I have been trying to get him to recycle that truck for years,” she told me, “but he just won’t hear it.” She seemed to like the phrase “stinky truck,” for I heard her repeating it to her friend as I drove off.

A couple of sales later I fell into conversation with a good looking guy in his late thirties, who told me about growing up in Iowa in a large family. He’s now a detective with the local police. He was selling some Harley parts so I brought my brother in law the Harley rider into the conversation. The detective told me a really good gift to give Bob is to buy a gift certificate to some Harley dealer located miles away from where he lives, so he has to take a long ride to redeem it. I love it—a gift giving dilemma solved on a driveway by an ex-marine Harley riding detective. (Don’t tell Bob what one of his future gifts is going to be.)

One sale I stopped at was serious about getting rid of things. They were offering a free gift for stopping by, no purchase required. I mentioned this at the other two sales on that block; at the first, they said they’d better go see what the neighbors had that they wanted. At the other, where we’d been talking about dogs, they were inspired to offer me a stuffed toy for my pets. (Which I had to decline; Lizzie guards toys ferociously, then takes them apart and flings stuffing around the house.)

I met two very nice pit bulls. The second was deaf, but sweet and smart, and she responds to hand signals. And one of the highlights of the morning was a two year old beagle, Cammy, reclining in the shade at the feet of the two ladies minding the sale. They told me they had adopted her on Thursday, from a pet store that goes to the shelter and rescues two dogs at a time from death row and finds homes for them. Cammy had the air of a dog who has been through a lot in her short life, and is grateful for her new home. And her ears are as soft as butter.

One of the last sales I stopped at was at the home of a woman trying to get rid of the stuff her grown children have left behind. “I started out with a four bedroom house,” she said. “Now I've got one bedroom and three storerooms. My goal is to have at least two bedrooms!”
She also told me how much she hates to shop. Really hates it, especially for clothes.

“If you go to the grocery store one of these days and see a naked woman,” she assured me, “that will be me.”

For $7.75, I brought home:

A bag of 15 fresh-picked Meyer lemons. I'm making marmalade with them. There are some things about Southern California I will miss after I leave this place!









Some future eBay items—wonderful shirt and vest by CP Shades (they won’t be wrinkled in their eBay pictures!) and a warm, crunchy wool sweater that was worn all of once.


Warm wool sweaters are not a necessity in SoCal.

Some door prizes for children’s librarians—a bell stick and this wonderful mitt with a dog on each finger—and tails in the back!

A box of Wizard of Oz note cards…













A couple of craft magazines, and a sheet of iron-on butterflies. My mother likes butterflies so this will accompany her Mother’s Day card next week. (And lest anyone is horrified at someone who would give her mother something from a garage sale as a gift—at whose knee do you think I learned this?)















A lovely gift wrap set with paper, ribbon and cards…

…snowman socks to make my feet happy next Christmas, and my ‘free gift for stopping by’ pack o’ napkins.

An unusual vase of plate glass & aluminum (it really does hold water!)…

…and a dress of heavy cotton that I plan to remake into a spiffy apron.

I completed an apron earlier this week, made from a long, jazzy skirt and the sleeve from a Jones New York silk blouse. Yes, I cut up a JNY shirt, but when you only pay fifty cents for something it gives you the freedom to do whatever you can think of with it. And, I must confess, it makes me feel like a very wealthy woman to be able to do that!