Tired, hungry and a car full of junk

Saturday morning’s sunshine was a good omen. I grabbed my keys, and my dog Chester (the only member of my family that doesn’t growl at me when I drag stuff home) and headed out for a little "junking" before anyone else woke up.

There were only a few estate sales listed in the paper but something about one on the South Hill caught my eye. For one thing, it was a private sale and they can sometimes be a great place to pick up a bargain. (The opposite can be true; we all think our own junk is worth more than someone else’s.)

The house wasn't open, and the entire sale was held in the tiny basement. A 50-year accumulation of books, and tools, and anything else you can imagine, and a crowd of shoppers, was packed into four tiny rooms. I started looking through the odds and ends and filled my own box with old tins, a vintage telephone, a Bakelite cake server, and one of my favorite finds, a box of old
sewing items.

I heard someone say that everything in the garage was free, so I checked it out. I dug through the crumbling shed and pulled out a couple of old windows, a mahogany tabletop, and a small pine door, and
dragged them to my car. I went back to the basement and I found a stack of old albums, including a couple of early Count Basie LPs, before I called it a day.

When Chester and I got home, I was tired, hungry and covered with dust and had a car full of junk. It just doesn’t get any better than that.