The dry Saturdays arrive on the Sound around June, and when they do the estate-sale signs go up on the corners on a Friday night. Somebody has a weekend to clear a house, usually because the person who lived in it has died, and by eight the next morning there are folding tables on the lawn and a coffee can for the cash. I go to as many as I can.
Reading a table
A garage table and a kitchen table tell two different stories. The garage is the record of the work a man did, the taps and dies and the drawer of small fittings sorted by size, a whole trade priced at a dollar a tool. The kitchen table tells the longer story. It is forty years of one family's suppers, the good serving dish kept for company and the everyday plates worn pale in the middle from ten thousand washings.
The broken ones
I go for the small broken machines. A mixer with a dead switch, a fan that will not turn, a dollar or two apiece, and I take them home to open on the next wet afternoon. Half of them are simple and I fix them in an evening. The other half teach me something, which is the better outcome, because a machine that stumps me is a machine I did not fully understand yet.
The manners of it
The family is very often in the next room, close enough to hear the coffee can fill up. That ought to change how a person behaves at the tables, and mostly it does. I do not bargain over grief. If a thing was clearly loved, kept clean and kept working and priced by somebody who did not want to look like they were asking much for it, I pay the marked price and I leave it at that.
What comes home
What I take home from a sale is mostly the arrangement, more than any machine. A whole life gets laid out on card tables by people too worn down to hide any of it, and it can be read in ten minutes by anybody willing to look. Reading glasses in a kitchen drawer next to a decade of saved rubber bands. A man's entire shop sorted into jars by size. That is what I use in the books, far more than any object I ever carry out to the car.
None of this strikes me as morbid, though I know how it can sound. A sale of that kind is the last useful thing a household does together, whether anybody there means it that way or not, and it deserves somebody who will look at it with some care. I go for the machines. I stay for the rest, and I bring most of it home in my head.