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| 7/15/24 Fresh Flours, Greenwood/Phinney Ridge neighborhood |
If you’ve ever lived in the same house for several decades (36 years, actually), you know that “stuff” accumulates. It’s a lot of work to un-accumulate all that stuff, but I’m on it.
Fortuitously, just as I was gearing up for the
task, the Maple Leaf neighborhood held it’s annual FREE Yard Sale event:
Nothing could have a price, and anything was up for grabs if you put it out on the
sidewalk in front of your house. Putting your address in an online map of
participants helped people find you, especially if you had any specialty items
that you wanted to note in your listing. I had never participated in the event before,
either as a giver or a taker, but it motivated me to put some stuff in boxes.
I never had so much fun getting rid of our old junk, which, it turns out, other people want! Except for one drawer that I didn’t get to, I cleared out my kitchen of much excess that had ceased to spark joy years ago, if it ever did (how do all those plastic containers reproduce?). I had noted LPs, CDs and analog audio equipment in my listing, and several happy “shoppers” picked through our huge entertainment center filled with cases of music. I enjoyed meeting neighbors, and it felt rewarding to see others delight in things I no longer needed or wanted. (A young woman exclaimed that my Star Wars soundtrack album would thrill her husband, and it gave me great joy knowing that he would receive it.)
By day’s end, very little was left of the dozen or so boxes of stuff I brought out that day. I put what remained into my car and drove it over to Goodwill the next day, where the line of cars wrapped around the block (likely all from Maple Leaf).
Feeling so satisfied that I was actually smug, I went to nearby Fresh Flours to celebrate. It was an exhausting weekend, but it felt so good that I’m now motivated to keep putting things in boxes and moving them out.
A note about Fresh Flours: This bakery’s plentiful sidewalk tables are on busy Phinney Avenue within visual distance of the Woodland Park Zoo. Three times just while I was sketching, a neighbor would pass the café on their walk and see friends seated at the café, pull up a chair, and join the party. It was fun and heartwarming to see a community interact this way.
What a great idea - a one up on the FB Buy Nothing sites which has allowed me to pass on a few things that weren't Goodwill worthy but that I didn't want to trash either. I'd been holding on to a dvd/vcr unit which no longer loaded dvds but the vcr part still worked - not enough for me to keep it hooked up when I had to change screens. Imagine my delight when someone was looking for a vcr so she could play some videos from her youth for her own kids. I hadn't posted mine because I didn't' think there'd be any call for it. Silly me. Just like you discovered, there ARE people out there looking for the older stuff. It was really a delight to chat with this young mother when she picked it up. We really do need to figure out more neighborhood activities like this.
ReplyDeleteIndeed! Our goods have become so "disposable," when they still have much life left.
DeleteI love the idea of a FREE yard sale. I donate a lot of things to Big Brothers & Sisters (They pick up.) but there must be some satisfaction when someone sees something of yours that you had an attachment to at one time and now they are excited about it.
ReplyDeleteYes!! And it was fun to hear the stories that old objects always seem to prompt.
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