July 8, 2010--Midcoast: Tag Sale (Part One)

Until settling in up here, there was no possible way to drag me to a tag sale. They always seemed so déclassé. Lots of Mason jars and crusty bottles exhumed from abandoned dumps. Old eyeglass frames and gnarly tobacco pipes. Boxes of books which one might think provoked at least some interest in me; but all I ever saw, as I disdainfully passed them by on those occasions when we were weekending in the Hamptons or upstate New York were battered paperback John Grisham novels.

But then two things happened. First, we have a number of eBayer friends who have been haunting yard sales for years looking for and occasionally finding something for a dollar or two that they somehow manage to resell on line for many times that.

One friend, Melody, specializes in unusual books. Not rare books such as a first edition of To Kill A Mockingbird that’s worth thousands and which, in two lifetimes, you might be able to “steal” from an unsuspecting seller; but things like old high school graduation albums, which appear to be unusually desirable or, better, an album that includes a famous person such as a Jerry Seinfeld. These can go for a couple of hundred bucks. People will buy anything.

So now, with time not pressing, I have been known to rummage through a box of books at a yard sale in the hope of discovering something I can pass along to Melody that she can sell for a fortune and cut me in for a share in the profit. Thus far, though, I have been unable to find a copy of Barbra Streisand’s Erasmus Hall High School graduation album.

Then, we bought this place. A charming 1930’s vintage cottage right on Johns Bay; and although all the casual chic furniture (read used), dishes, pictures, and knickknacks were included in the purchase price, in the process of “making it our own” we are heavily into figuring out what to keep as we explore the many nooks and crannies we keep discovering and disposing of the rest. We think that over time we will wind up replacing at least half of all the otherwise wonderful things we “inherited,” and Rona is already trying to get me to agree to set up a couple of tables on the road and have a tag sale of our own. This I am not yet ready for.

And Rona contends, since as we edit out we need to replace, tag sales are places we should frequent as we hunt for serving pieces, pictures, table runners, walking sticks . . .

But, I say, “I don’t need a walking stick. Much less many. I don’t have a limp.”

“Not yet,” she says without irony. “We have a perfect place for at least a half dozen—in an old copper thing right by the roadside door. They would be perfect there. And of course we need teakettles. We should be collecting them. There are some nice ones in the cottage already and we should keep our eye out for more.”

“More? Teakettles?” I ask, emphasizing the pluralness, “You know I don’t drink tea.”

“Again, don’t you get it, these are not teakettles for making tea; these are teakettles for collecting. We need at least a dozen for it to qualify as a collection. We need all varieties and vintages.”

“Why would that be?” I naively ask, “Aren’t three, maybe four enough?”

“Three or four is not a collection.”

When I stare blankly at her, she adds with a hint of superiority, “Don’t you know anything about cottages?” Of course I don’t, except that they require a lot of maintenance. “Every book I’ve ever read about cottages says that if you own one you have to collect things. Like jugs, which I know you hate, McCoy pottery, door stops, ship models, which I know you love, and teakettles.”

So each weekend we have been seeking out yard and barn sales. Looking for stuff around which to build a collection.

We quickly came to know that if you want the choicest pickings you have to get there early. So on Saturday mornings we get up at dawn, which this far north is at about 4:30 am, and stumble toward the one that from the ad in the local paper seems most promising. To steer us away from pressed glass and jugs and toward walking sticks and teakettles, on Friday’s we deconstruct the text of the ads, looking especially for words like “collectables” or “estate pieces,” and plan accordingly.

Two weeks ago the barn sale we staked out as most promising turned out to be. No teakettles but a couple of decent Audubon prints to add to our growing collecting of bird drawings and paintings ($25 each); an old cranberry-gatherer’s basket that showed signs of lots of use which suggests that it must be at least 100 years old and thus qualifies as a genuine “antique” ($35)—we are using it to hold our bathroom magazine collection; and a nicely carved bobwhite—again appealing to our bird fetish (a real steal at only $5).

A very good start to the tag sale season. And so this past weekend, thus energized and with me no longer demurring or disdainful and now totally obsessed with getting to as many barns and lawns as possible on a given Saturday, we rose again at dawn ready to pounce on a barn sale that advertised that the offerings included “genuine Maine antiques” and a second one, a more conventional tag sale, but showed promise since the ad for it indicated that it was at the home of a “well-regarded Pemaquid landscape artist.”

Without any prompting from Rona, I said, “That one also sounds good. I prefer barn sales but maybe at this tag sale we might be able to find some coastal landscapes. We could use a few of those.”

“Do you mean a few or a collection?” Rona offered with an affectionate wink. I nodded as we downed second cups of coffee to get our blood flowing.

To be continued . . .