For Sale: Just About Anything

One sure sign of mid-summer: the public marketplace otherwise known as the roadside is open for business. 

Joining the long-standing establishments with clever signage and a wide (often very wide) range of merchandise attracting customers to their doors are the myriad enterprises that nearly daily sprout up in yards, garages, and driveways.

Among them are seasonal run-from-home shops that sell Adirondack furniture, wooden toys, picked crabmeat. Maybe tidy bundles of camp kindling or bouquets of zinnias. Soon, for the lucky few, there’ll be quarts of wild blueberries. Unlikely to return here, however, are the island pie ladies who once parked their cars, put out a plywood sign and, beneath the shade of a tree, read a book while awaiting customers. Nor, sadly, is my neighbor down the road likely to offer again her cinnamon doughnuts or whoopee pies spread beneath her wide-armed maple, having declared she is, this time and for sure, retired. But I’m still waiting to see if in August, the causeway turn-out attracts another fellow like the one who, a few summers ago, parked his pick up and sold from its bed large white plastic barrels that my husband Bob expounded upon every time we drove past, certain we needed one though for what purpose he’d yet to figure out.

Along the roadside, all manner of motorized conveyances are generally for sale – trucks, cars, tractors, ATVs, snowmobiles – or the trailers to pull them. For a few summers, on Sand Beach Road, Bob had his eyes on a vintage fire truck, its light green body growing more rust-pocked with each passing year. For a time, parked in the yard of another house near there was a truck with an emblazoned sign, “Bandit and the Bitch,” its original purpose having had something to do with the fisherman owner’s business but prompting our visiting grandson to ask, “Is that some kind of rock band?”

Increasingly, fresh vegetables are available roadside. Once, though, such options were few. My favorite was just over the bridge, at a place called Grandview Farm. Its chalkboard sign may have succinctly read week after week “Cukes and Glads” but the late owner who cultivated a few beds stretching down to the Reach was best known for his slender French green beans. In front of another house along the same road, a sign offering “Day Lillies and Asparagus” suggested, if not a connection between the two I couldn't make, how someone had clearly engaged in niche-marketing. My favorite offering, though, in that same neck of the woods advertised on its wooden sign: “Fresh Clams Doug Daily.”

Naturally no summer is without its plethora of tag, garden and yard sales. As is the case elsewhere, somebody’s cast-offs are someone else’s finds, though that often seems especially true for frugal and inventive islanders. Maybe it’s a throwback to leaner times and days when transport to the island wasn’t so easy, when the life cycles of commodities increased triplefold because they had to. Or maybe in one’s possessions there’s always another use just waiting to show itself. I covet my plumber Lewis’s handmade wooden tool carrier painted red and bearing all the nicks and scars of years of use. Were it mine, I’d see in its future a peaceful retirement holding mail, magazines, a few pieces of stove kindling. It would join the ranks of an old wire apple gathering basket now eased into service holding towels in our hall bath or the perforated metal bait box on our kitchen counter a friend mistook for some kind of former surgical instrument sterilizer and is now our breadbox.

If such treasures are what you’re after, you may not need to scout the sales. Instead, visit our two island dumps or, rather, Transfer Stations as they’re called literally but inviting, to me anyway, many metaphorical musings. There, some objects – old appliances, machinery, car parts, used lumber and metal – don’t necessarily die but are scavenged, often by visiting artists at Haystack, and thus reborn.  Into, say, cedar-pole mounted birdhouses with car springs and old propellers. There, too, the Martha Stewarts among us envision potted begonias cascading from a spindle-back chair’s rotted out seat or dahlias peeking from the tops of ripped rubber waders.

Making a dump run can be an adventure. At the very least, it’s a typical weekly chore where you’re apt to bump shoulders with a few island friends. Certainly it’s a far cry from wheeling to a suburban curb your large plastic garbage cans (and may I pause here to ask if the invention of a garbage receptacle impervious to the gnawing of a squirrel is beyond human reach?).  It may also be that having to load your car or truck with trash, drive to the dump and then drop each bag into the various containers already bulging with garbage and recyclables is a way to make us more mindful of the amount of trash we generate and the fact that our refuse actually goes somewhere, to some piece of earth that otherwise might’ve been an open field, a bird sanctuary or park, and doesn’t simply disappear into the maw of a large truck.

As I always do this time of year, I see in the beehive activity of roadside enterprises the evidence of ingenuity, talent and necessity but also a reassuring sign that more summer weeks are yet to come. Too soon, I know, signaling the beginning of the end of the season when boats are hauled ashore, the plank of plywood spraypainted “We Shrink Wrap” will again go up in the yard of a white clapboard just outside the village. As proof, squatting on the lawn beside it, like one of those immense squash left to balloon and go to seed in a late season garden, is one of what will become several tautly-wrapped boat hulls. About then, too, after all recipes have been exhausted, card tables heaped with piles of large zucchini will appear in a driveway. No signs are required. That they’re free for the taking is as universally understood as carmakers hope their symbolized dashboard dials are. But certainly that wasn't the case for a recent free giveaway. Mid-summer two years ago, high on a hill behind a house under renovation, a small outbuilding looking more like a demonstrator hoisting a placard and insisting on its civil rights bore a large black-lettered sign declaring itself “FREE.” By season’s end it was gone and I had to assume someone claimed it. It would’ve been fun though to see how such a find was carted away and, in the cycle of things here, to what purpose it newly served. But chances are good. At the height of some future summer, while cruising our busy roadside marketplace, I may well find out.