Another Man's Treasure

An excellent sport here that is seriously overlooked by summer people and weekenders in the Hamptons is Yard Sale Scramble. The playbook comes out on Wednesdays in the form of the local newspaper, the Southampton Press. Serious players map their route based on the announcements in the Classifieds and start out at the crack of dawn on Saturday or even Friday morning.

I'm more of an opportunistic hunter. The weather here today was sunny and perfect and I needed a good excuse to get outside, and I've been thinking that I need a spare bicycle for summer guests. So I noted the half-dozen closest sales and set off in the Jeep. No particular plan or agenda - but I had a full tank of gas and my trusty GPS, and given those things here in the Hamptons, I am fearless.

The true flavor of a town is not in its manicured city center, its restaurants, or its boutiques. Visit the yard sales, the thrift stores, the local deli. Those are places where you can begin to peek through the curtains.

The best one today was in the nearby town of Water Mill, on Dead Trail Road. Just getting there involved a lot of turns on twisting, unmarked back country roads (this part is a lot more fun with a patient electronic navigator riding shotgun). The "For Sale" sign in front of the house was a clue - as near as I could tell, the sellers were the children of a couple who may well have lived in that house all their lives, and were now to the point of distributing a lifetime's accumulation of... life. Old tools that must've hung in the workshop for years, unused. A cheap microwave. A fur coat. Souveneirs from vacations, furniture that was good when it was new. A walker, a portable toilet, and the miscellaneous things that collect in a house where someone is dying. It was somewhat like walking through someone else's family photo album. I was curious about where she wore those furs, what he built with the tools, where they were now.

Beware the "fake" yard sales, the permanant flea markets with their broken down collection of junk. These tend to contain the dregs, the ghosts of garage sales past. There are no memories there, only fragments and a strange scratchy desperation.

I only found one bicycle today, and it was sufficiently rusted out and abused that I couldn't see offering it to a guest. But I did find a collection of small looms (for Mom), a pair of beach chairs, a basket (to hold fruit at the office), and a small pottery bowl that is nicer than I could make. Total: $16. I'm hard pressed to put a value on the memories.