Now that the dust has settled from my wife’s accident, we decided to return our attention to the original problem that resulted in the accident: cleaning out the attic. The goal was to separate out those items that we could sell at a yard sale. I called the Homeowner’s Association to order some Yard Sale signs. It’s against the Homeowner’s Association rules to use homemade Yard Sale signs, and it’s against the Homeowner’s Association rules to attach balloons to your sign.
On Friday night, I picked up the Yard Sale signs on the way home. They’re small, with tasteful green lettering. Very elegant and understated.
After dinner, I climbed up the attic stairway to resume the process of organizing, reviewing and, in certain rare cases, discarding the seemingly endless collection of useless junk we keep in the attic. The garage soon filled with a gigantic mound of bags, boxes and trash, with a narrow path threading through the center, just wide enough to admit a wheelchair.
On Saturday morning, I got up at 6:00 to begin the laborious process of hauling the junk out to the driveway and arranging it in some kind of seductive arrangement, to make our crap look like desirable treasures. Then came the task of sign placement. It seems that I suck at this. It’s my opinion that you place the signs in such a way that they are visible to the existing flow of traffic, with arrows on the signs to inform the driver whether to proceed in the current direction or whether to turn. Apparently this is hogwash, because several people made a point of telling me that they got lost trying to follow my signs. I harbor a sour suspicion that those people routinely get lost in their own homes.
One small corner of the junk we tried to sell
What’s worse is that there seems to be a problem with people placing other signs. Later in the day, I noticed that a realtor had placed an Open House sign directly in front of my sign, so that it could no longer be seen by drivers until they were right on top of it. And in front of the Open House sign, another homeowner had placed a HOMEMADE Yard Sale sign, handwritten on a piece of orange Day-Glo poster board, festooned with balloons.
I didn’t see any Homeowner’s Association vigilantes cruising around, roughing up homeowners who dared to use unapproved Yard Sale signs, but we did see a uniformed sheriff’s deputy eyeballing our stuff from an unmarked car. I suspect he does it every weekend, looking for stolen merchandise.
I’m amused by the drive-by shoppers. A large American car (usually a Buick or an Oldsmobile) will come up the road and slow to a crawl in front of our house. The window will roll down, and an elderly woman will stick her head out and examines our merchandise with beady eyes and a scowl. Inevitably, the window rolls up, and the car drives away.
Collectors come by as well. One guy wanted World War II memorabilia. He didn’t even look at our merchandise; he just got out of his car, hustled up and asked. Then he hustled back to his car and peeled out, on his way to the next yard sale. Another guy asked me if I had any coins. As it turned out, I had a big bag of wheat-back pennies in my bureau drawer that I’ve had for years. I brought them out and he gave me 2 cents apiece for them.
At the end of the day, we had sold about a quarter of our inventory, but nobody bought any of the particularly heavy items, which of course, I had to drag back into the garage.
The next day, we repeated the process, but on Sunday, you get most of your traffic between 11:30 and 1:00, because that’s when people get out of church. We sold a few more things, netting a total of about $100, which my wife pointed out will not even cover the emergency room co-pay.
I made two trips to Goodwill Industries (which I refer to as Good Riddance Industries), ferrying the unsold items. I was met at the donation door by a woman who politely informed me that they would not accept some of our items for various reasons. I said, “OK, if you can’t take them you can’t take them.” The following day was trash day, and I had no qualms about depositing the leftovers at the curb.
“Thanks for being so understanding,” she said. “Some people just scream at me.”
Years ago, we owned a house in Boston that was in a kind of depression, sitting lower in the neighborhood than other houses. Shortly after we moved in, a Catholic church up on a hill nearby paved an acre of their property, thoughtfully angling the pavement in such a way that rainwater ran off down the hill, directly into our yard.
Boston is in a part of the country where rainstorms drift in, hang around for three or four days sprinkling the area with a modest drizzle, and then float lazily out to sea. The rainfall was usually light enough that you could walk two blocks without an umbrella and barely get wet. However, once in awhile, a tropical depression would slide up the coast, dumping torrents of rain on the city. When this happened, a sloshing stream of water would flow off the parking lot, filling up our low-lying driveway, and flood the basement. It took a couple of years of legal threats before the church installed storm drains in the parking lot, which pretty much cleared up the problem In the meantime, I bought a portable sump pump.
Whenever it rained hard enough to worry me, I’d break out the pump, slosh through the puddle in my driveway, drop the pump in the lowest point and run the hose out to the street. Sometimes this worked, and sometimes the pump just couldn’t keep up, and we’d spend a week drying out the basement.
When we decided to move to Florida, we thought about selling the pump, but I knew that tropical storms were a regular occurrence in Florida, so we decided to keep it just in case. But we soon discovered that Florida has had lots of experience with tropical storms, and neighborhoods are well-drained. So the pump has been sitting in our attic for a decade.
Recently, a friend of ours told us she was going to have a yard sale, and wondered if we wanted to participate. We discussed the many useless objects we owned, and agreed that the pump has fallen into that category.
There are many variations on the story of Aladdin, but my favorite is the one where the genie was imprisoned in the lamp by a sorcerer, where he remained for 1000 years. During this time, the genie vowed generous rewards to whoever should release him. But over time, the bitterness of his imprisonment turned him against mankind, and he swore to kill whoever let him out of the lamp.
As our pump sat idle in the attic all those years, the genie inside must have undergone a similar transformation. It must have made a chilling decision when it overheard us talking about our plans for the yard sale.
In Florida, storage space is hard to find. Attics are usually accessed by a narrow pull-down ladder between the joists in the garage. Usually, the homeowner buys some plywood and creates a semblance of a floor, on which boxes of Christmas decorations, empty suitcases, unused furniture, childhood memorabilia and other junk is piled in huge, unstable towers.
My wife climbed up the ladder and began sorting through the lifetime accumulation of crap that everybody thinks they will want someday, but which usually becomes a burden for their children to dispose of after their death. She handed down a series of items, including a cane chair with a giant hole in the seat, a trash bag containing a Queen-size egg-crate foam pad that we used to spread on the futon whenever someone would visit (because the futon mattress was like sleeping on bags of QuickCrete), and other bric-a-brac. Eventually, she came across the box containing the pump.
I stood on the attic ladder, and my wife pushed the heavy cardboard box across the flooring to me. I grabbed the box, and executed a pirouette on the attic ladder, so that I could descend facing outward, holding the box in front of me, my behind bumping from rung to rung. You probably think you know what happened next, but you don’t.
My wife returned to her rummaging, as I gingerly stepped down the first rung of the ladder. Suddenly, I heard a loud crash. I was holding the box in front of my face, so I lowered it a bit to look into the attic. I didn’t see my wife, so I demanded to know what had toppled over. Hearing no answer, I lowered the box a bit more, so that I could see across the ceiling of the garage. There, in front of my eyes was a hole the size of my wife. I lowered the box a bit more, and saw her, lying on the garage floor, gasping for breath.
Somehow, I stumbled down the ladder and dropped the pump box. My wife was obviously in pain. She had stepped off the plywood flooring onto the sheetrock that composed the ceiling, which cannot support that kind of weight. She broke through and miraculously landed on the trash bag holding the rolled up foam rubber pad. But she had struck something on her way down and couldn’t move her left arm, or stand on her left foot.
She was able to hobble to my car and I drove her to the hospital. It was about 10 pm. We were swiftly ushered into an emergency room, where she was examined by a Physician’s Assistant and given Percoset for the pain. After several hours, she was taken away for a painful set of X-rays. She had broken the ball joint in her left shoulder and a bone in her ankle, which at this point may require surgery to correct.
We were in the emergency room until 6:30 the following morning, watching reruns of Deal or No Deal. A combination of our confinement and sleep deprivation made me bitter and angry, to the point where I swore I would kill the next medical professional who promised to take care of our needs “in a few minutes.”
The wife-sized hole.
The landing pad.
The contents of the landing pad.
The home of the evil pump genie.
