My Ashes of Dead Lovers Garage Sale

If Spring is Here,
Can Garage Sales Be Far Behind?


Oh, sure. I know, Garage Sales go on all the time: Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. But Spring seems to bring out the most “pack rats” of all.
Along with Buying a Whole New Spring Wardrobe, Restyling My Hair, and Spring Cleaning comes the urge to “ Get Rid of All This Clutter in My Life.” Possessions I thought of only a few short weeks ago as Priceless Treasures suddenly become Useless, Obsolete or Unwanted.
“What on earth am I keeping this for?” became a recurring chant as I began spring cleaning. “I really don’t need this” was the Second Verse and the refrain that followed was, “I really need to have a Garage Sale.”
Actually HAVING the Garage Sale is the easy part. Particularly if you can ‘con’ a friend into having one.
When my Artist Friend Jan expressed the desire to Have a Garage Sale, that was all I needed. “Why don’t you do that,” I urged. “I’ll bring some of my Discards and Rejects over and help you. (By Discards and Rejects, I meant Things, not Old Dates and Boyfriends.)
Then came the hard part: Deciding What to Put in the Garage Sale.
I began in Uncharted Territory: My kitchen. While I haven’t been exactly drinking out of jelly glasses, I was tired of the same old plain set. I’ll get some new ones to replace these, I vowed as I tossed (well, not exactly tossed, but placed) those six or eight tumblers into a box. A few pots and pans. Barely used. Two cookie sheets so ‘cruddy’ I’d never get them clean. (You can see where my priorities were.) An old coffee pot, perfectly good, but I like my new Mr. Coffee maker.
In the storage room I found twin bed sheets. I haven’t had twin beds since the kids were at home. They definitely had to go into the Garage Sale. The sheets, not the kids. And pillowcases and bedspreads, and then it was time to Clean my Closet.
I wanted to put everything in the Garage Sale, but I can’t afford to start all over again, so I just weeded out those items that I could absolutely no longer tolerate.
Like a T-shirt with a rather risqué message on it, a gift from a former boyfriend. A tape of music given to me by another former admirer. I spent a few minutes looking at a photograph of a One-Time Significant Other, wondering whether it would be in bad taste to take the photo out and put the perfectly good frame in The Garage Sale. Greed won over sentiment and it went into the Garage Sale stack.
Soon I had a car full of Stuff and I hauled it over to Jan’s to begin putting tags on everything. We worked smoothly for a while, being practical about our pricing, until I heard Jan giggle.
She was holding up the T-shirt. “I remember who gave you this.”
I shrugged. “Somebody might as well get some use out of it.”
She picked up the tape. “What’s this?”
“It’s from Old What’s His Name,” I said defensively.
I held up a painting. “ Where’d you get this?’
“I got this the last time I went to Mexico with You Know Who,” she said through clenched teeth.
“Oh,” I said.
And then we came to the Picture Frame. “What kind of picture did you have in here?” Jan asked.
“You remember Old Faithless. A couple of years ago? That was his picture in there.”
“We sure are getting rid of a lot of Clutter in our lives,” she remarked as she affixed a ten-cent price tag to the frame.
“Yeah,” I agreed. Our dating lives were arrayed in front of us. I suggested, “Maybe we should call this The Ashes of Former Lovers Garage Sale.”
We giggled as we continued our marking and reminiscing. Soon we were finished and we surveyed the garage. “Looks good,” we sighed in unison.
“Just one thing,” I said as I picked through the rummage and found the Picture Frame. I scratched through the ten-cent marker and carefully replaced it with a quarter.
“There,” I said with satisfaction. “The time I spent with him should bring me more than a dime.”
We retired to a couple of glasses of wine.
At last count, I had made $32.20, much of it from my Old Boyfriends stuff. I thought, this might induce me to have a garage sale of my very own.
But not any time real soon.
I have to build up my inventory.