Holy crap, it's Yard Sale Season again here! Almost a year since I started this story and I've been redrafting since. I really need to get over it and finish the damned thing:
(For Fritz and Ursula, with love and respect)
It is well and truly yard sale season, and even as the sun rises the tribes amass like armies preparing for war; the buyers and the sellers and the browsers and the hagglers. Their field of battle is the six and a half mile stretch of road between the towns of Portalingo and Tecumseh, Mississipi. Neither town is more than a pit stop on the flat lanes of pavement that extend beyond their borders to places far more interesting.
But to the people who live in those two towns, there are few things more interesting. This is more important than Christmas or any other holiday, because those are mostly days celebrated with family. Yard sale season was a week, and it involved them all, young and old, but mostly old because this was smack in the middle of the Bible belt, and the old ruled. They refused change and clung to the small and the quiet, so the young tended to drift away.
Yard sale season isn't quiet, though, it's a time to make some noise. Dawn finds them preparing: tables moved into position by men complaining about their backs and women telling them to hush. Big wide picnic cloths shook out like pennants over the wood and plastic and Formica tops, settling there like wrapping on a birthday gift. The steady transfer of bric-a-brac and old kitchen appliances, what-knots and what-the-hells, books and clothes and baby toys, and more and more; from garage and loft and storage shed they come, arrayed lovingly, priced with tags and stickers, enticingly low, waiting for that pair of eyes that simply must have them. Things that some might have thrown away years ago, or that others may not have wanted.
During yard sale season, nothing is thrown away, and nothing is truly unwanted.
