Many years ago, in fact decades age, I wrote about Uncle Frank's boxer shorts my grandmother had given me to recycle.
They had not been worn. Frank was written across the bottom, and I stuck them in my PJ drawer, knowing Clay would not appreciate Grandma's sentiment.
After that time in our lives, I went to work in education. I no longer had time to thrift and garage sale shop. My Saturday mornings were usually doing laundry and dishes and Sundays were meal prepping.
It was not until my career was winding down twenty years later that I picked back up with a few of my friends in our Garden Club. We found some sweet spots from Gulfport to the south shore. And in my recent endeavors I have discovered there are a whole host of people who do this as a hobby.
I am beginning to see several familiar faces at local estate sales and Goodwill hang outs. There is a pack of elderly men who breeze in to dig through tools and other odds and ends. There are several elderly ladies who like to pick things up and put things down. They move slowly and you might as well just back up your buggy and go at the aisle from the other end if they are speculating on a chipped water pitcher.
And the most fascinating of these shoppers are the ladies around my age who must be interior decorators, shop owners, or collectors. They mindlessly wander up and down the aisles until that Whoosh! sound is heard. That is another cart being pushed out from the back with new items. These ladies take a nosedive for the swinging doors and begin plucking items up to place casually in their buggies.
It only took a few trips of missing out on the bird cage and the fiesta dishes to develop my own strategic course. I even blocked the red head with my buggy to counter an attack, only for her long arm to reach over my shoulder to grab the dark green depression glasses as she half smiled/half hissed, "You snooze, you lose." Had they been dark blue glasses she might have lost an arm.
Not long ago I was spending one of my usual Saturday mornings waiting for the Whoosh! And when it occurred a young petite college aged girl unfortunately got caught between the red head and the elderly white-haired man who sits on the used couches scrolling on his phone ,waiting for the next Whoosh. The poor girl was trapped between a flying topiary, an ornate bud vase, and a hammer. Her eyes went wide and both hands shot up in an act of surrender. And that only slowed those two scavengers down long enough for me to snag the porcelain quails. Give me milk in a dirty glass and a sedative for the attacked young lady likely attempting to decorate her first college dorm room.
When I got home I handed Chloe, our pup, a new/used doggie toy. It was an orange and white tiger that squeaked. I placed the purchased lamp on Clay's side of the bed and my husband said to our dog, "That's right, Chloe. She has retired now so we can't have anything new. We can only get other people's old junk."
Chloe wagged her tail and dropped her new prize in her toy basket, and Clay clicked off his new/old lamp. If they only knew what I must go through for this family!
