“Seeing more, knowing more, having more to remember—it all has a cost, a weight.”

Virginia Woolf

The heat broke, and I am trying to enjoy the milder weather. But it’s Virgo season, I’m told, one of those mutable signs. In between, we’re in transition.

Soon, the onset of those early-fall garage sales. A few years in suburbia, I have theories. Billy’s heard me try to piece things together. I can just about time the market. We’re about to get those sales where the moms have dredged the house: some of them have been circling, waiting for the moment the kids got back to school. They pile the bounty along the driveway. Outgrown scooters, abandoned dollhouses. It’s all haunted with summer.

There are no mysteries at a garage sale. What a person thinks of their home, their stuff, and their time: it’s all there, on display.

“I’m a terrible snoop,” I’m quick to declare when I talk about my love of garage sales.

I’m the friend who has investigated the contents of the shower upon visiting your bathroom.

What am I looking for? I’m never looking for anything in particular. It’s just that there’s an honesty to the lineup on a shower’s ledge. The lineup doesn’t lie. I don’t know what it’s saying, but it doesn’t lie. It’s a candid.

Years ago my mother told me a second-hand story about a person we knew in common. It was about the circumstances surrounding the person’s birth. The series of events was surprising, and unusual, but not shocking.

“Oh wow, I never knew that,” I said.

“Well, don’t say anything,” my mother warned. “I don’t know if she knows.”

Her own story, my mother didn’t know if the subject of the story—the object?—knew its details. That’s what gave the story the shock, to my mind, not the contents. What on earth, I wanted to ask my mother, were we doing on this side of the story? Like cutting through the neighbor’s yard, this was simply not how things were to be done.

My slice of suburbia is old enough that a handful of other young families have lived here before. I find their treasures as I pull weeds along the rock beds. A bunny’s face painted on a flat stone, a jewel that might have come from the bottom of an aquarium. They’re in there, whether I look for them or not. I found one the other day, a rock with the word “DREAM” stamped into its surface. Feeling its heft, I realized it was fake. The hollow rock had a patch of long-dry glitter glue along one side. It has lived another life, somewhere else, once. It’s out of place here, a non-rock rock among rocks. It’s in between and doesn’t even know its own story.

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