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The Maine Lawn Sale

Those hot sticky days are here with us again. The temperature is creeping right up around 58 - 60 degrees, and summer has finally come to Maine.

And once again it is time for that unique event found nowhere else in the world --- the Maine lawn sale.

Now I am personally in favor of lawn sales. It's the only thing in Maine that the legislature hasn't regulated. It's the last vestige of free enterprise left in America today --- unless you count the Mafia.

If you're from New York or Boston and you've just moved up here, so you can live life like it should be, you might be tempted to have a lawn sale --- so you can blend in with the natives.

You might decide to have the sale all by yourself on your own front lawn. Or you might get together with some of your friends or neighbors just so you can advertise a 3 FAMILY LAWN SALE. Or a super 6 FAMILY LAWN SALE. The more families you get to join you, the more impressive it sounds and the more of a crowd you're likely to draw.

Here's how the Maine lawn sale works. To begin with, you have to have some things that are absolutely worthless. It might be clay ducks someone gave your second wife for a wedding present. It could be toys that your kids have broken or outgrown. Be sure to include that exercise bike that you never did have time to use. You pick a day for the sale and advertise it in Uncle Henry's, and on TV. You can't believe what one ad on Channel 9 will do for you. Go around the neighborhood a week before the sale and nail hand printed cardboard signs on telephone poles. Put up a lot of them, because most of them will blow away or get wet and fall apart. The night before, drag all the treasures over to the appointed place and store them in a barn or garage. If you don't have a storage place put it on tables and tie it down with blue tarps.

The day of your great sale arrives. You get up at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning and drag all your treasures out on the lawn, or take off the blue tarps.

Now, it really doesn't matter what time you advertise a sale, because professional lawn sale goers will be tearing at it like raccoons on a box of garbage an hour before you're ready. If you advertised your sale to start at 8, the grim-lipped professionals will be digging for the treasures under your tarps at 7.

All this sounds harmless enough, but there is a very great danger in having a lawn sale --- it's rain.

Do you have any idea what happens if you and six of your friends have been hauling stuff to your house steady for a week and then, on the day of the sale, it rains?

You can't hesitate. You have to load every bit of it on a truck and haul it to the dump. Right then! Don't think you can sell it the following weekend, because by then everything will be soaking wet and shopworn. Nobody will even look at it. Another danger is, that once you've started a collection on your lawn, people will drop things there during the night, and before you know it, people will be mistaking you for a native.

The summer will pass. Your collection will grow daily, and not until October, when the leaves turn to gold, will your rusted metal blend in with the fall foliage.

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