Secondhand spring: Giving soul to our stuff

Spring is baseball, trout fishing and flowers.
It’s also the season when people start cleaning out their basements and attics, which can only mean one thing: garage sales.
The tables are laid out in driveways, items marked for prices and signs posted on street corners. Up until recently, I drove right past.
I would never stop at garage, rummage or estate sales because, for one, I’m not a ‘stuff’ guy. Besides a handful of personal possessions (pictures, books, my mirror with a poorly painted bullfighter on it) I’d leave everything else to burn in a house fire and not miss it.
Like most other dudes, I’m not too fond of shopping for new stuff, so why would I want to go look at other people’s old crap?
My girlfriend, Meredith, is the complete opposite. She is a junk junky. She likes to collect odd specimens found in odd places (me, for instance).
Needless to say, it makes it difficult to drive right past sales anymore.
Last junking season, we were almost the proud new owners of one of those old “vibration belt” exercise machines. You know the ones: the advertisements always showed housewives standing at the machine with a belt around their back, jiggling and shaking them while they darned a pair of socks.
The machine Meredith found at a garage sale was at least from the 1960s and, at $15, quite the bargain.
We reasoned that it could be a great party novelty: whomever was mixing up the martinis only need to strap themselves in and hit the “on” switch.
I was almost sold on it. In the end, we succumbed to our better judgment and left it in the owner’s driveway.
This season, I’ve already been, mostly begrudgingly, to four or five estate or garage sales here in Manistee.
To be a good sport, I usually make a sweep of the house or the tables, and then go and wait on the front lawn until Meredith comes out.
At one particular estate sale, I wasn’t so lucky.
For those who don’t know what an estate sale is (I didn’t know until recently), it’s when someone who is moving has an open house to try and unload as much stuff as possible. At this particular estate sale, I made my routine sweep of the upstairs, pretended to look at a few things, then followed Meredith down into the basement.
I looked at eight-track tapes, an organ and a box of Mason jars. There were old clothes, a reel to reel and an old sofa, cream-colored with a bursting orange flower pattern.
Two men decided to purchase the couch and lifted it up while I was in another room looking at a mound of electronic equipment I couldn’t identify. I decided I’d head upstairs and go outside and wait.
When I got to the stairway, the men were pushing the couch up it. When they got it to the doorway, they stopped. They could go no farther.
The couch was stuck. So was I.
I was trapped in the basement for fifteen minutes while the couch was maneuvered out the door. I was furious at first. I was impatient. I wanted out.
But there I was. Eventually, I calmed down. It gave me time to reflect about other people’s stuff. Slowly, I started to realize that there is something endlessly fascinating about junk. Each item contains a part of the life of whoever owned it. If we give our “stuff” soul, maybe we’ll be less likely to shuffle it off into a landfill whenever the whims of mass consumerism strike us.
Getting something from someone else for so cheap is a bit like sharing. Trading goods leads to a community.
Our “stuff” is just one thing that can bring us together.
Loftiness aside, I admit that I was the first one bounding up the stairs once the couch was out of the way.
I didn’t buy anything then, but I did enjoy playing a little Word Yahtzee that Meredith picked up at a subsequent garage sale the other night.
The box the game came in was worn and old, born the same year as me: the copyright at bottom of the scorecard said 1977.
I wondered about all the conversation and laughter contained in the 32-year-old box. I was happy we were giving it new life.
You certainly don’t get that feeling with something from Wal-Mart.