In our daily drives through Northeast Salem we often pass by homes whose owners think it is a good idea to hold perpetual garage sales.
They are not difficult to recognize, these near constant yard sales, these never-ending households liquidations. Normally I would smile at the thought of people downsizing their junkpiles and getting rid of the detritus of oh-so-many years.
But face it — this stuff is crap.
If it wasn’t crap, eager sale shoppers would have long-ago carted off every last item to be loved and rewritten and repurposed in their own homes.
We do that. But the garage sales we go to last no longer than two days. They contain gently used products. They have things you might consider haggling over.
Let me be the first to proclaim that three months of junk in your front yard is not a garage sale — it’s a lifestyle choice.
Take for example this stack of appliances and household goods covered with tarps and blankets that has been sitting in front of one of the houses east of the railroad tracks. I wish I had a follow-up photo to show you how this garage sale rises, like a maimed phoenix crawling out of a cesspool, every weekend.
News flash: If you leave it on your lawn overnight and nobody steals it, no one is going to pay for it either.
I might act like I love everything about this neighborhood we call home, that the quirks and the kinks are lovely and acceptable in every way and that I don’t long for pristinely manicured boxwoods, sidewalks edged by the likes of Frank Gehry, or front yards that are absent of homeless domestic leftovers. But let me tell you something. I checked up on a property some friends bought in a well-kept, tidy little block on the other side of Market the other day and pictured a life where I didn’t have to question my neighbors’ aesthetic worldview.
Strangely, as we checked out the property for our friends, a new neighbor came on by and asked us the requisite: How can I help you? (We must have looked like complete thugs in our late Sunday-night lounging wear). The homeowner was already looking out for our new friends’ new home, as there had been “prowlers” in the area recently.
Come to my neighborhood! Prowl away! And while you’re at it, can you move some junk for us?
Annoying…and so sad.
I had a family member who got divorced (yes, divorced!) to hold onto what the rest of us would call junk, which he insisted was “valuable.”
He still had a shed full of it, worthless as ever, when he died a decade later. His kids, literally afraid to venture into the depths, had to pay someone to haul it away. For anyone who has the stomach and the large truck for this particular business venture, I understand the owner of 1-800-GOTJUNK put himself through college clearing out this kind of impacted, rusting, vermin-ridden “treasure.”
I know that if you talked to the junk owners, you would leave the encounter shaking your head in confusion, because they can’t literally see what’s so obvious to everyone else. To them, it’s security, value, wealth, and prosperity. To us–trash. After all, it’s not like you can live in a broken washing machine if the going gets tough.
Your main hope here is to get someone else–someone who likes to live with what still works and is inside the house–to buy the property. Good luck with that, though. After all, where would the present folks go to find space for the “valuable” stuff?
When we lived in Tillamook in the 80′s, the city finally passed an ordinance to prevent the perpetual garage sale. The Tillamookians thought it was a little harsh, if I remember correctly. No one in the city limits was allowed to have more than one garage sale a year, but ya know maybe that is enough.
Overnight on the lawn in Salem is bad enough, but in Tillamook? Who knows how many mold and mildew spores had propagated overnight!
Ahh, yes; such sights take me back to my days in rural Indiana, cars up on blocks, washing machines lying askew in the lawn…
Geez, whatever happened to pride of ownership? Or even pride of rentalship?
Come on down to the south-of-Market area! Sounds like you’d be really close to us. Good neighbors — unfortunately, we are close enough to the hood that they sometimes run through our streets and steal car stereos and lawn ornaments.
Oh, you gotta check out the house on the corner of Portland Rd and Hyacinth on the north side of town… it’ll make you laugh. I can’t tell half the time if they are having a yard sale, or if they’ve just redecorated. Things seem to change often there, but I never see any sale signs.
:p
I’m pretty accepting of other peoples’ habits. I don’t want to live in a gated community that charges condo fees for uniform upkeep. Also, I have a lot of sympathy for people who are struggling to make ends meet. Lots of our neighbors have lost their jobs, and it is likely that many of the perpetual sales are attempts at quick cash in down times. When my husband read this post he said I should have posted it as an Emily: Angry! because that’s how it read. Well, I’m not angry, my eyes just hurt.
The one at Center and 17th has been going for about 2 years now…like clockwork most weekends. Although, with some courtesy for the neighbors, they actually go to the trouble of hauling all of the crap in and out of the house each time.
I made a comment yesterday — don’t know if it was too brash for approval or if the universe kept me from making it by encouraging some technical failure. I look at it as a chance to do better, either way. =-)
But in response to your follow-up, Emily, don’t be afraid to call things what they are. There is no valor in laziness and lack of respect for the way one treats one’s belonging and the mark it makes in this world. Nor do I believe there’s much value in pussy footing around such things; a lack of expecation leads, as we see, to a general lowering of accomplishment.
If people truly are on hard times, I would hope they would take care of their items and work hard to make the most of them and get the most for them, thus improving their situation.
Leaving items out in the elements, or having repeated yard sales where the same cat-puke-stained pillow that reeks of cigarette smoke is priced at $10 without every realizing 1)the market won’t bear that and 2)if you’re not selling anything, your time would be better spent elsewhere–is just stupidity, plain and simple. The market reality right now is that the supply of used goods, gentle and otherwise, is way way WAY outpacing the desire for such.
We’ve had a few homes in our neighborhood vacate in the last few months. Suddenly the entire house is on the front lawn and for sale, so you know it’s not good. I feel for them (and realize I could be in the same boat in an instant), and notice that those with the nicer homes have the nicer things, and that they care for them equally, even if that means a little sweat to haul them back inside each night over the duration of the one to two weekend sale.
On our way home from WoM, me an Steve were just talking about this! I love your topics you come up with..always make me laugh- See ya soon!!
Amy, that’s pretty much how I feel — going back and forth, sympathy and disgust. I’m leaning towards disgust today. But since my opinion keeps wavering, I thought it didn’t really warrant and Emily: Angry! Come to think of it… I haven’t gotten angry in a while!
Now I’m sensitized to this issue, and I saw a few on the ride home — I thought about taking pics and creating an online gallery of shame.
The worst one is on Park. That dude has a sign he puts out “we’re closed!” Um… garage sales don’t open and close. They’re on, and then they’re off.