Who hasn’t been to a garage sale? Until recently I had been to maybe a handful–although I held a few huge ones preparing for big moves. A newfound delight, I am deriving heaps of pleasure and finding wonderful treasures by going to yard/garage sales and flea markets. I don’t think Marion county is any different than many others when it comes to the reprocessing of goods and discards. What does surprise me is that second hand merchandise is the lifeblood of many, many "merchants." The professional buyers scramble to garage sales early Friday morning and scoop up anything they believe will resell at flea markets, thrift or consignment stores, or on ebay at a higher price.

As I see it, the business of second-hand goods serves many useful functions. It provides a source of income to people willing to buy and sell in what I would consider a precarious environment, made that way by the unpredictableness of the availablility of goods. I found a large distinctive etched mirror at a local charitable thrift store priced at four dollars. I passed it up. The next week I saw the same mirror at a consignment shop with a price tag of $55.00. While I only saw a mirror, someone else saw profit.

This second-hand market is a source of household goods at very inexpensive prices to people who have limited financial resources. Recently at a yard sale, I chatted with a newly separated man who was furnishing his apartment from garage sale findings. He had $200 dollars to spend, had found just about all he would need, and had money left over. His purchases included new towels, assorted linens, a box full of cleaning supplies, bags of kitchen utensils and dinnerware, alarm clock–a car full of stuff to supply his new life.

Garage/yard sales provide an answer to the dilemma of "what do we do with all this stuff?" Consumerism doesn’t feel so bad if we can put our discards into the hands of someone else. It seems that it’s harder to toss something out if we paid full price for it. I hear "someone can use this" or "this is too good to throw out" rattling around in my head. My stuff tends to make the back seat trip to the local charity drop-off door.

Everybody has boxes of things, often transported during moves from one house to another without ever being unpacked. You know the ones–they have newspaper articles, old magazines, mementos, maybe some old family photos, what I call desk detritus (2^nd definition: debris). I have a few. The stuff from the back of the drawers, bottom of the closet, top shelves, that gets dumped into a box when we move. We keep this stuff because it has some meaning to us. Put it out at a garage sale and be amazed at how easily someone else will pick through it, select anything of value, and discard the rest. Without meaning, the stuff is just stuff.