Desperately Seeking Salem

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?

My neighbor is a modern-day Da Vinci. He’s an idea man whose impulse to test the limits of the physical world never ends on paper.

Recently he took a look at a child’s toy from India — the kind of colapsable double helix — and decided to make one in his front yard to fit the community space he is creating for all of us to use.

Here it is nearing completion. When he is finished, he’ll send crawling wisteria up the sides and have a homemade gazebo.

I’d chalk it up to the recession, but some minds choose to create no matter what the economic impulse is. I have a hunch that he’d be making this neighborhood meeting space no matter who is losing money on Wall Street.