The summer is officially on! The calendars call it the Memorial Day Holiday. Unofficially around here it’s also known as Yard Sale Weekend. Just after dawn the tarp-swaddled card-tables appear in the dooryards. By breakfast, all over town, small printed signs flap like loose scales on the stakes, stumps and roadsigns to which we have stapled them. Too small in fact to read from a passing car, the signs are easily deciphered by their clustered profusion and positioning alone. 9 AM is a magic hour. The tarps come off, the cashbox is dosed with change from the night-stand, and up and down the North Country, Vermonters turn out their old junk for its annual airing.

Items have their seasons: battered paperback copies of Steig Larsson’s two published thrillers (“Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “The Girl who Played With Fire”) move briskly this year; the third in his trilogy is due later this summer. Other items self-deposit like glacial till — crockery, dusty silk flower ornaments, children’s games — creeping passivley and persistently, year after year, back and forth between the households lining these highways.