Every two years or so, I join my friends Jean and Patty in a yard sale. We combine forces (junk), and fill Jean’s front yard in lovely Evanston, hoping that people will reach into their pockets and purchase our discarded items. We did pretty well, all told, but we always have the requisite amount of strange people.
A few years ago, we had one guy who asked to use the bathroom, and spent about 20 minutes in there — making himself comfortable — until we enlisted Jean’s husband to extricate him. He didn’t leave a nice odor behind. I mean, really . . . WHO does that? Who asks to use the home of a stranger who’s hosting a yard sale, and when she is nice enough to allow it, you reward her by destroying her plumbing?
We also had the family who brought their pet squirrel. Seriously, this thing was tame. So tame that I couldn’t resist picking it up. Cute, but weird. We eventually had to convince them to buy the pet cage that we were selling and put the squirrel in it.
Then, we had the most memorable shopper of 2005 — the woman who had a minimum of 5 kids, and was full to bursting with her 6th. The kids were unruly and wreaking havoc on our fragile merchandise, so we were hoping and praying that she wouldn’t go into labor and leave us to deal with the kids — prisoners-in-training.
This year, we didn’t have anyone nearly as freaky as those from ‘05. We had The Prattler - a woman who prattled endlessly about her life — she’s relocating back to Chicago, and she’s upset that her daughter married a Kiwi who relocated her to New Zealand. She seemed pretty upset that her daughter has moved away, so I asked if she would ever move there. That was a big BIG mistake. She took that as an invitation to tell me all about the reasons that she would never move to New Zealand.
She mentioned that she had been to library school. With that knowledge, I happily pawned her off on Patty, who also has her Masters in Library Science. Mean, yes, but they had more in common.
Then there was the 74-year-old widow of one year who bought one of my mother’s collection of never worn beautiful clothes. The 74-year-old announced that she was hoping that she’d meet a new man in one of the outfits. If anyone out there knows someone who would be willing to marry a 74-year-old, please let me know.
I was kind of disappointed that there weren’t more freaks, but at least we made more money this year.
