yard sale.

last week i cleaned my closet with a purpose. my mother and i decided we would have a garage sale, and set the date for today.
yesterday after work i spent the entire afternoon and into the evening sorting and pricing
clothes and bags and shoes and doo-dads [for lack of a better term].
we woke up at 6 this morning to make the coffee, eat our oatmeal, and start setting up in the front yard. we had our plan of attack: which things should go on this or that table, and how it would all be arranged. it was even mapped out.
things started out a little slow, but gradually people came and spent a dollar or two.
bigger things started to sell, and all the while a very fine mist came and went with the whim of the clouds.
we monitored the weather forecast pretty closely, and talked with shoppers about what they had heard. it was destined to be risky, but we stayed open and got thoroughly damp. ["six inches deep in mud!" ok, i exaggerate.]
finally, after a longer lull, the darkening clouds threatened to shut us down, and a final mad dash of people giddily buying things for dress-up and camp and kitchen and cabin picked over a good portion of the remaining items. we waited a few more minutes for a she-friend of the giddilys to come check out my dress array [anyone around my size need really nice dressy dresses from europe? anyone, anyone?], but the weather must have discouraged her. with a crack of thunder and the mist turning into raindrops we put up our hoods and began to run with armfuls of things- to the car! to the house! all in here! quick! hurry!
we're back inside now. it's dismally dark and the screens are clouded with raindrops. a brightly colored radar screen warns us to stay indoors for a while.
after we get cleaned up and dried off, we shall make a nice pot of tea, and count our earnings to see if today was worth it.
the odds are it was.
x

ps. immediately after writing this post, i was summoned to run outside and help reroute the torrents of water pouring off of our roof. our basement flooded terribly last spring, due to record snowfall and loads of rain, and it flooded a bit the other night again. the reason? our beautiful new cedar shake roof is in place, but the roofers wrecked our vintage rain gutters and put them on wrong. so now we have a several-gallons-per-second rainfall coming into the window wells outside our basement. no good. well, we filled the hole with buckets [which instantly filled] and deflected the rain above that with boards and buckets. we shall see how much mopping our cellar requires. it was kind of fun getting totally soaked whilst playing house-rescuer though!