The Yard/Garage Sale, A Rite of Passage

FTLComm - Tisdale - Saturday, May 25, 2002

Like many people I have always thought of garage and yard sales as a commercial event. People clean out the basement or the garage and sell off the things they no longer need or use. This morning and my wife and I toured garage sale after garage sale I realised that what we were seeing was a social event. Each selling family had reached a point in their time line when it was decided that it was time to move on. Some literally are in

in the process of moving, to another job, another house another way of life. At one of the sales I suggested to the lady that perhaps she waited too long to get to this sale. She was selling a mountain of outstanding children's toys, puzzles, children's books, children's clothing. She said that indeed that was the case her children were now fourteen and eleven and she had been holding on to their toys and things in a way of clinging to the wonder of their developing lives.

The stack of tobacco cans and the horror of illness that that much tobacco would produce lead me to wonder if that was part of someone's "quit smoking" process. The chandelier that was for a home with another decor. The nostalgia of the old match boxes and the antique trunk. But perhaps so common to every garage and yard sale is some form of exercise equipment. It seems required as people go through phases of personal development and self awareness. Something else that seems so common to each were collections of coffee mugs, with business names and logos, Christmas decorated mugs, dishes of all kinds, some complete sets. Then the classic transition the set of dish ware and other decorative stuff on a theme that has had its day, cow dishes, cow towels, cow drapes, time to move on.

But the best story of all came from a young man. I told him of our visiting each sale today and the amazing things we saw. He said that on one such expedition in Saskatoon he and his wife were looking for some children's things and came across a garage sale made up almost exclusively of women's lingerie He said as he looked at the exotic items he couldn't help wonder which of the matrons present wore these items and what had lead them to sell them. Garage and yard sales are clearly a modern rite of passage, a sale where we get rid of some things and re-align our internal navigation system.