Went up to Alcona for the weekend, car loaded with boxes labeled "junk," to help with a yard sale my mum was throwing. "Long weekends are the best for them," she said, "because everyone's out and about - cottagers and locals; we'll be able to unload everything" [Read: if it takes a purpose to get you down here and for me to have my girls here together, then yes, the yard sale absolutely must take place this weekend]. OK. It was also a good opportunity to get rid of a lot of crap that had accumulated 'round these parts over the course of three years and a great reason to knock off for three days and see my family, so we filled the catz' dishes to overflowing, left the toilet seat up and a couple of windows cracked, filled the trunk and piled into the car. Stopped in the Tdot to pick up my sister and ever-hyper Tank and their junk (and to see her amazing - and much safer - new apartment), and headed North.
9 hours in the car after a half-day of work only to be wakened at 6:30AM the following morning to haul the loads of stuff out to the end of the driveway right beside the big "FOR SALE" sign at the fence. Once the tables were set up, the lawn chairs brought around and the coffee made, the sun came out bright and we settled in.
I was reminded of why I like garage sales so much.
And of why my mum is looking so forward to moving.
There's something about putting items you've either worn tired of, grown out of, have too many of, or just no longer want, like or need anymore on a table outside with a little stickie price written in a sharpie marker for your neighbours to buy. It creates an air of disclosure, as though a little space opens where the discards of your private everyday life become public. Your customers feel it too (You know what I'm talking about. How many times have you gone to a block sale just to take a peek into what kind of gear the families down the street have out? And how much they're asking for it? Or just to see how they've aged since the last time you walked down for their last sale?) and offer up gaggles of gossip about who left who, whose daughter went and got herself pregnant, the gory details of their or their spouse's surgeries, who's a drunk, who's clean now and for how long, what happened to so-and-so after they got that DWI on their snowmobile last winter...nothing is sacred and it's easily, casually dropped as they hand you their dime for that decorative silver spoon your gramma got in Florida eons ago.
Now, Alcona's kind of a town-in-transition, as it's been slowly but steadily become more heavily residential: subdivisions have been built - they even have a traffic light, a Tim Horton's and a 24-hour grocery store. It's slowly becoming part of the "greater Toronto area," but only because the larger single-lot homes are "affordable" and make the 2-hour commute to work seem worthwhile to many. My mom's been living in the same house through the entire transformation - she bought in 1984 when a field (with deer!) was our backyard and the nearest shops were a bakery and convenience store (the bakery's now a strip mall, but Jean's Variety is still very much there). Summers were a little busier with Torontonians coming to summer at their mansion-like "cottages," but generally it was a pretty 'typical' small town - minus the pleasantville "community."
All day long we met people new to the area, still starry-eyed about leaving the big city and gushing about how wonderful it was to move somewhere more quiet, much safer, with a clean lake, and good schools. Cool old guys with big bellies who reminded me so much of my grandpa who bought up all the loot-bag style little boxes of junk - plumbing odds and ends, random nozzles, plugs, the works - who never left without a little back and forth about what perfect weather it was for something like this. And a wicked wannabe gangsta guy - folded up fifty dollar bill tucked into his ball cap and all - who paid double what we were asking for an old set of barbells because he was trying to impress my sis. Hilarious! So many people, all so different, most friendly and chatty, some more serious, others morose...Some you'd love to see back for tea or a beer on the back deck; amazing weavers of stories with happy lines in their faces and mountains of experience in their smiles - people who asked a question because they honestly wanted to hear the answers. Others who made us shake our heads and laugh in amazement when they left.
We also re-met people who we've sort of known all our lives, but hardly knew outside of loose hair salon chatter. People who had heard my sister was on television now and stopped by more to catch a glimpse of a celebrity than for our cheap wares. People who had seen the "FOR SALE" sign on the house and were itchin to know the deets (How much you askin? How much land is here? Is that an addition? Wow, your gardens are gorgeous...landscaped?"). People who heard that my dad passed away at the end of last summer and who hadn't sent a card, come to the memorial or dropped by since and were suddenly - almost violently - all hugs and I'm so sorries to my mother.
And the four of us, the deliriously tired, sun-drenched, dehydrated and giggly-loopy merchants, were just hoping we wouldn't have to pack too much of that shit up at the end of the day.
All in all, we fared really well. Made over 160 bucks through nickel and diming in one day, had 5 or so bankers boxes to drop off at the Goodwill, and we all got sunburned.
Turned out it was rainy, windy and cold in Montréal the whole weekend.
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