Rummage

We sold a box of odd china saucers from the garage we would have like to peruse and consider
           in spare time, the minutes after the ding before clothes are finally dry in the dryer, to a
           neighbor who pedaled up on an old Schwinn with a wicker basket.

We sold anything anyone would take except for some blue glass canning jars that everyone
           wanted. Everyone asked. We sold the clear Ball jars. We kept the blue ones. A weird
           boyfriend of one of my mother's divorced friends said we should use them to give a
           spiritual charge to water. We use them for stray buttons and collar stays and change.

We were surprised how much bargaining was involved. I sold two valuable mirrors and five
           wooden suit hangers to a woman for ten dollars and she has become a family friend. I
           sold a mirror in a mirror frame with matching mirrored chest. They are "items" now.

Goodwill refused to load some of the remainders, and of those, we kept some. The sideboard that
           miraculously matches my grandmother's dining room set, now dispersed, houses the
           tools of my father's most difficult to categorize as well as a few Japanese bowls too
           heavy to lift if filled with food. The old toy piano. Some of the keys didn't work. When we
           took off the back we found several hundred dollars. We kept that piano for years, as
           thanks.

In New England they were tag sales, in the Midwest, garages. In London, they're trundles. Here,
           now, there are signs, and the same stuff, getting newer, with the same old smell of other
           people's houses or problems or dust.