Column: Garage sale spurs the cycle of basement stuff once again
Published 12:00 am Tuesday, June 11, 2002
“Saving up your money for a rainy day, giving all your clothes to charity. Last night the wife said, oh boy when you’re dead, you don’t take nothing with you but your soul &045; Think!” &045; John Lennon, &uot;The Ballad of John and Yoko,&uot; 1969
This coming Saturday, June 15, Albert Lea will have a city-wide garage sale as a part of the festivities of our annual Eddie Cochran Weekend. My wife and I just had a garage sale in April, but we are planning another and have once again been rummaging through our basement and garage, looking for more things to sell. It was without any real surprise to us that we found things we had forgotten we even had.
Being in our basement is kind of like being in a museum. It’s a little cooler down there than in the rest of the house. All kinds of relics from the past lie dormant in labeled rows of Rubbermaid tubs &045; artifacts, preserved for posterity in vinyl or plastic (or whatever it is that those tubs are made from). I realize that in a museum the exhibits are displayed in glass cases, but bear with me. And, like with the exhibits in museums, all of the items down there were either purchased by or given to us.
The trip to the basement was well worth the effort. We found all kinds of things that we can actually use. When we lived in an apartment, we bought things for the kitchen and bathroom we would have when the day came that we finally lived in a house. Well, that day has come, but our basement still houses enough new towels to open a Bed, Bath and Beyond store. We opened one tub to find a cluster of summertime clothing we had forgotten we even had. I had recently been planning to buy several short-sleeve, button-up shirts to wear to work. It turns out I had about a dozen of them already. And since I had completely forgotten about most of them, it was like getting a free summer wardrobe.
The expedition continued. Some of our forgotten possessions brought back fond memories of those points in our lives. Some helped us track our spending history. It seems like we acquire an awful lot of things over time, especially books, CDs and movies. Books probably more so than any of the others. I am pretty sure that between the two of us, my wife and I buy more than 100 books every year. When we start running out of shelf space, we then either take in some of the older ones for credit at The Constant Reader or donate them to Friends of the Library.
The memories didn’t end there. Every now and then we get on a “collecting kick,” and have to snap up everything we can find on a particular theme. Egyptian things, shot glasses and candles are a few such examples. I wonder how many salaries we paid employees of Pier One Imports, Spencer Gifts and Candleman. Others closed the book on a few unsolved mysteries. We found things we thought we had accidentally thrown out or lost while moving.
Not everything we found was a keeper. The point of our search was to find things we could get rid of, not re-clutter our living room. Some of it will make its way to the tables of our garage sale or, in the case of some of the clothing, to The Salvation Army Thrift Store. It’s not that the clothing is out of style or worn out &045; it just no longer fits me. Gaining fifty pounds in one year will tend to render some of your clothing too small to wear &045; especially pants.
Some things we found made us wonder what we could have possibly been thinking when we bought them. These are the kinds of things destined for the “free” box at garage sales.
The city-wide garage sale will provide us with the opportunity to ferret out some of the things we no longer need and to get rid of some our clutter. I just hope we don’t pick up someone else’s.
Dustin Petersen is an Albert Lea resident. His column appears Tuesdays.