Before, I hadn’t reflected on the fact that, yes, this is someone else’s stuff, and yes, it might be on this table for a profound reason
Saturday morning yard sales are a summertime staple in my part of Canada. For my daughter and me, it has become one of our weekly summer rituals. But last year, something changed about the way I approached the sellers. I started noticing that often the people standing alone behind the tables were grieving.By Thursday, the ads are up on Facebook with enticing but often truncated details and specific rules . Then the comments start rolling in .
And then, I registered what he was selling. In addition to the standard fare , the tables were covered in dachshunds: figurines, plates with dachshund faces, mugs with dachshunds. I stopped. Paused.“Yup,” the seller replied. “We used to keep them. We even had a kennel. Until my wife died.” Encountering this grieving man stopped me in my yard-saling tracks. I bought a small dachshund figurine and told him it would remind me of his wife and children. I said their names out loud. I thanked him for sharing his story with me.
I’m a university professor, and my research program focuses on death, dying, and grief. So, I’m mortified that it hadn’t occurred to me that yard sales can be such a tangible act of grieving. When do you have a sale? After a death, after a divorce, after losing a job or when a move is imminent. In the past, the fun and challenge of going to a sale, rifling through someone else’s stuff, seeing how cheaply you could haggle a deal, was the whole point of the adventure.
Philippines Latest News, Philippines Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Michigan boy uses slingshot to save sister from being abducted from yard, police sayA Michigan girl was able to escape an attempted kidnapping when her brother used a slingshot to strike the would\u002Dbe attacker.
Read more »
Michigan boy uses slingshot to save sister from being abducted from yard, police sayA Michigan girl was able to escape an attempted kidnapping when her brother used a slingshot to strike the would\u002Dbe attacker.
Read more »
Yard waste collection starts this weekRead the full story and comment on Tbnewswatch.com
Read more »
Home sales ‘surged’ in April as buyers came off the sidelines - National | Globalnews.caThe housing market in Canada has been warming this spring after a rapid rise in interest rates put a chill in buyers and sellers alike.
Read more »
Statistics Canada says wholesale sales excluding petroleum down 0.1 per cent in MarchOverall, sales fell in four of the seven subsectors tracked by the agency
Read more »