After a long two weeks of work, the yard sale went off this Saturday without a hitch. We drove around Friday night putting signs up amid the neighborhood, and by 7AM on Saturday there were people stopping to look at the stuff we hadn’t put out yet. Finley was very excited to help with the sale, enlisting Mama to bake brownies and muffins for her to sell along with a collection of My Little Ponies. She made a sign and set aside 10% for charity.

It was hard to see so much of her childhood disappear down the road; the guy who bought my backpack tried to talk me down from my price, but considering he’d gotten bargains out of me before that (and was not so subtly trying to send his wife away, who was prepared to pay full price), I held firm. He wound up wearing it home—they filled their car to the brim with other stuff—which was a fitting way to send it off.

Finn was the consummate saleswoman for the whole day, and got great responses from everyone who stopped by. She was out of brownies by 10AM.

People seemed to come in waves. There were few times when nobody was here, but every half-hour or so we got a surge of tons of people at one time. Most of the big stuff was gone by 10 but lots of odd stuff left too—things I never thought we’d sell. I was pretty lenient on haggling with people but a few came in so low I immediately played hardball and kept the price firm. $5 for something marked $40? Fuck off, lady. One woman asked if we took checks. An Asian fellow talked me down from $3 to $1 for a watch, then wanted to throw a $.50 shirt in for free. I made him dig through his pockets for the $.50 on principle.

Most people were very nice, however. At 11:55 a lady stopped by with her mother and waded through clothes for the next half-hour, finally stopping with a huge pile and the rest of Finn’s lemonade. It was so beautiful outside, we didn’t mind staying open an extra half-hour. We sold more stuff then, too.

Speaking of Finn, by 11AM she was sold out of everything, save one pony. Her total take was $19, which means the cuteness factor force-multiplied her sales by roughly 300%.

After cleaning up, we putzed around the yard for a couple of hours before going to the neighbors’ for a cookout, beers, and ice cream. All in all, a great Saturday.