prospecting

    If you've ordered cloth recently, a big batch of orders left the PO on Monday so...soon.  Thank you all. This is a first, selling out thread and cloth.

    Spring and spring cleaning are here. I would love to take an old-fashioned junking expedition. Heading out on a Saturday morning and stopping at every yard sale sign I see. Carry cash and maybe even dicker a little. 

    

    Many years ago, my friend Barb and I would plot a course from the garage sales listed in the most current Pennysaver. Remember those? I honestly don't remember what either of us was prospecting for. It wasn't cloth. Our tastes in most things were diametrically opposed. She went for what I call Americana Kitsch and I looked for Bizarro & Sorry I Bought it a Week Later. 

After a rather wasted (in more ways than one) day, we headed back to her place at dusk. A few streets from home, a big yard sale was long over and the unloved stuff was piled on the curb to wait for the garbage man.

     She just had to have a large platform rocking chair with overstuffed cushions. There was also a big box of hundreds of empty aluminum film canisters. You know the kind. So, something for each of us, but the chair would not fit into the trunk of my car. We tried. As big as the trunk of a '53 Chevy is, the two of us could not lift and turn the chair in a way to make it fit. 

    

    So we did what people did back in the seventies. We sat on the curb and split a joint to consider the problem. There was a coil of nylon rope in the trunk and somehow we decided that this chair would survive being dragged behind the car for a few streets.

    The streetlights came on. The mosquitos found us. We roped up the chair and turned the radio up loud to drown out reasoning and headed for her place. She was nattering on about our route for the Sunday sales and I forgot I was dragging a hundred-pound chair and picked up speed to all of twenty-five in this asphalt-paved residential neighborhood. 

    

        "Stop!!" she yelled. The dregs of another failed yard sale were heaped on a curb and she wanted to check it out. I jumped on the brakes and the Chair launched itself into the air to crash into the implacable steel bumper of my two-ton Chevy. I had also forgotten the box on the roof while we were figuring out how to transport the chair. 

    At the sudden stop, the box flew forward, hit the hood, and dumped hundreds of tinkling little metal canisters rolling into the street. Porch lights popped on from both sides of the street. I cut the rope, jumped back in the car, and we took off, giggling until our guts ached, the dead chair and hundreds of twinkling metal eyes in my review mirror.

Simpler times.