Tag Archives: Summer

Yard Sale!

My trash is your treasure.

Funny: It feels like I am making money.

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.

Our Morning Routine

Mmmm...Swamp water!




Just about every morning Tucker & I leave the house around 8:15 or so and hike the half-mile trail through woods and up the hill to my parents’ for a cup of coffee and a breakfast visit. On the way we pass the frog pond, where Tucker rousts the natives and stomps around in the tall grass for a bit.

At the top of the hill I take his leash off and he makes two or three rounds all the way to the house and back to me while I slog up past the veggie garden, the raspberry patch, the pool and the back/front lawn. He has short little legs, but covers more ground in less time than I can, by orders of magnitude.

Once inside, he breaks straight for the living toom. He doesn’t even bother with the formality of greeting anyone who might be sitting just inside the kitchen door. He bolts for the big plate glass window before my dad’s armchair, and takes up his sentinel post on lookout for doves, chipmunks, robins, juncos, hummingbirds or whatever might be out there. He clocks in at various positions along the window by pressing his nose prints into the glass.

Tucker doesn't even pretend to greet us any more. Breaks into a run at the door and takes up his post at the window in the living room. Note white smudges at far end of glass, about nose height...

Tucker watches for doves, chipmunks, robins and juncos.

This is Tucker’s idea of heaven.

First [Spring] Day…

It was hot enough today to fill Tucker's wading pool for the first time. Too hot to kayak.

It was hot enough today to fill Tucker's wading pool for the first time. Too hot to kayak.

I’ve been here a week now. A week and change. I’m starting to feel like life here is normal life. I’m starting to not-notice things like what time it is, half-way through the morning. It’s been hot today — easily into the 80s, maybe even 90. Summer is officially about a month away. Unofficially, it starts early next week — the Memorial Day holiday weekend. Yard Sale Weekend. We're making signs and inviting everyone we know. We’re having a yard sale too this weekend. My neighbors and I. We’re making signs, cleaning house, tagging stuff, telling everyone we know. It’s a good little project for me — a change of pace [not!] from what I’ve been doing lately. Packing, moving, finishing up — I know teachers have a great job, a job on terms 90% of the world would kill for, but you know it’s not perfect when one of the best things about it is the amount of time you don’t have to spend there. Continue reading →