Yard Sal

So said the sign Josh and Ethan hung on our fence today.

It's Maple Festival time around here, which means our town becomes even more Stars Hollow-like than it already was. (Think modern-day Mayberry, for those of you who do not have the viewing habits of a 13 year-old girl and were, therefore, not fans of Gilmore Girls.)

Our town square is transformed into a gauntlet of booths with vendors hawking everything from food to jewelry to artwork to toys to all-things maple. Seriously, not just maple syrup but maple bark, maple-coated nuts (of every variety), maple ice cream, maple cotton candy, maple butter, maple sugar. . . this is starting to sound like Forrest Gump.

The gazebo in the town square is the center of the festivities, so it's where one can witness the live music, the crowning of the Maple Queen, and the pet parade.

No, I am not making this stuff up. Truth is, I actually enjoyed it. It's fun to live in a town where we can walk over to the courthouse lawn and have a fun time with our kids and see all of our friends and neighbors. And their pets.

So, what does a yard sale have to do with this? Well, in our town whenever there are festivities, there are yard sales. Lots and lots of yard sales.

My kids decided they wanted to partake of the capitalist love and sell some of their toys. Or at least their sibling's toys.

They spent an hour and a half "selecting" toys to sell, toys which almost inevitably belonged to someone else. Since no one was willing to part with anything treasured, the final inventory consisted of about six happy meal toys and a couple of movies they don't like.





I know, you wish you lived here so you could be the proud new owner of not one, but two, plastic robot arms without a body.

I convinced them that $1 was probably too much for each toy, so they changed their pricing label: (The yellow box has 1$ scratched out, and the yellow one says, "10¢ a peec.")



Not to be deterred by a meager inventory, they set up a table in the front yard and began hawking their wares. For about twenty minutes.



Thank you, John W., for driving by and having your daughter pay $2 for a matchbox car. It brought their total sales up to exactly, um, $2.