August. Already.

Though summer doesn’t officially clock out until late September, August has long been the season's finale. Its Last Hurrah month. The Final Stretch month. The I Can’t Believe It’s Here month. Or, in some quarters, the At Last It’s Here month. 

Once, August was the last full month before school starts, back in the day when nearly all schools re-convened after Labor Day (and when, not so incidentally, it was mandatory to put away our white shoes). Now, though, most school calendars pin students to their desks in August, some as early as mid-month. Before the calendar’s flipped to a new page, chugging yellow school buses become as much a part of the August landscape as picnics. Or tag sales.

Known in other parts of the country (and increasingly here) as yard sales or garage sales, tag sales have long seemed to me most prevalent in August. Whether announced in the local paper, on hand-printed signs nailed to power poles or tacked on community bulletin boards, tag sales provide ample proof that somebody’s cast-offs are someone else’s treasured finds, especially, it seems, for frugal and inventive islanders. Perhaps a throwback to leaner times and the days when transport to the island wasn’t so easy, there’s always in one’s possessions another use just waiting to show itself. On an island, the life cycles of commodities seem to increase triple fold.

Call the heaped-up stuff in someone’s yard or barn “junk” and you’ve not only risked hurling a mighty insult but you’ve suffered a failure in vision – seeing all the new usage just waiting to be discovered in rusted parts and battered pieces. Ditto the island’s two dumps, officially called Transfer Stations (and inviting, I must add, lots of metaphorical musings). There, the Take It or Leave It shed is especially popular. As are the mounds of old appliances, machinery, car parts, used lumber and metal, from which Haystack artists routinely visit and salvage dump-finds for their creations. One sits on our mantel – a small Cornell-like box assemblage that definitely puts to new use some rusted wire, springs and old wooden spools. For the salvagers amongst us, going to the dump can be an adventure. It’s certainly different than wheeling to a suburban curb a large and much gnawed upon plastic garbage can that prompts us to wonder once again: is the invention of a garbage receptacle impervious to squirrel incisors truly beyond human reach?

Along with a plethora of tag sales, August is also the month when myriad enterprises sprout up and make of the roadside a public marketplace. Announced by way of signage, bright flags and various modes of display, run-from-home enterprises offer Adirondack-style furniture, picnic tables, wooden toys, picked crabmeat, pies. Once, parked along one of the island’s two main roads was a large seafood truck, its paint-lettered side panel proclaiming “Bandit and the Bitch.” It prompted many visitors to wonder aloud, including a teen-ager in our car who asked, “Is that a rock band?” One August, a man parked his pickup at the causeway and offered for sale large white plastic barrels, one of which my husband seemed certain we needed but for what purpose neither of was certain. Most missed on our road are the cinnamon doughnuts and whoopee pies once sold daily by a good baker neighbor. So, too, the “pie ladies” that used to roam the island, park their cars in the shade and sell oozing fruit pies from their trunks.

My favorite enterprises are the simple card tables and cash boxes that, come August, appear at driveway or lane’s end and with them bundled camp kindling, bunches of zinnias, copious amounts of zucchini and cukes. Of course in some yards, it’s hard to tell what exactly is for sale, so brimming are they with various goo-gahs and lawn ornaments. For a few summers, the must-have lawn decoration seemed to be wooden cut-outs of women bent over, their bloomers showing, and stuffed doll-like figures dressed in children’s clothes and arranged in such ways – bent over a picnic table or a large tub of gernaniums – that their faces never showed, a frightening army of muteless faceless children. Still popular are the black silhouette cutouts of animals and people, often in odd contextual placement – a fisherman atop a mailbox dangling a fishing pole, not a drop of water in sight, a bear and her cubs traversing a flagstone patio and raising no alarm, an old woman in a rocker sentenced to a kind of existential rocking beside a roadside ditch. Displaying an artistic bent in re-purposing are creations such as a road-side mailbox employing an old computer monitor and labeled “email.”

Perhaps the most ambitious and in some ways my favorite tag sale, this a single offering, had to be just over the bridge in nearby mainland Sedgwick. One August, behind a house under renovation, like a demonstrator hoisting a placard and insisting on civil rights, a small outbuilding high on a hill bore a large sign that in large letters declared itself “Free.” Eventually, the building disappeared and so I assume someone did in fact claim it. I wish though I’d seen how it was carted away. And, of course, to what newly re-invented purpose it now serves. Chances are, it may already brim with stuff. Just waiting for another August.