serendipity at the yard sale

Serendipity is the gift of finding agreeable things when you are not exactly looking for them.
Take the wall mounted hand crank pencil sharpener my husband bought shortly after we were married. I had not considered buying one. However, it proved to be so handy, that when it wore out, I insisted it was an essential to part of housekeeping.

As a young couple setting up housekeeping in the early 70s we shopped the flea markets and rummage sales. We didn’t tell a lot of guests, but found our first set of dishes, a stack of restaurant plates, on the ground at a flea market. Together we scrubbed, bleached, polished and exulted over our purchase. Over time most of them broke. For memories sake I still have a couple of the green trimmed, white ironstone in my china closet.

The addicting power of rummage and garage sales is the serendipitous discoveries. On one of my first garage sales excursions, I found an electric doughnut maker with molds to make six doughnuts and holes. That was the day I quit making crisp, tasty, if fat laden doughnuts the old fashion, messy way in a deep fat fryer.

I bought the doughnut maker, took it home, stirred up a batch of muffins and produced a heap of doughnuts. They were the perfect breakfast for my house full of hungry guys. Combined with bowls of chocolate and vanilla frosting and toppings of nuts, coconut, chips and sprinkles, they feasted on variety and fun every time I pulled the doughnut maker out. Eventually our waistlines and concern for calories outgrew the doughnut maker, but it was the perfect, if unsought, find for several years.

I thought I had found a couple great pictures for my son’s house last year … until I got home. The frame and color tones matched our house so perfectly, that I hung them on my living room walls. I kept them, even after my son’s wife admired the pictures and I admitted I had originally purchased it with her house in mind. I let her make her own serendipitous find: A quartet of antique framed prints of roses.

As my life has changed, so have my serendipitous finds. Recently they have been office supplies, such as the 10 cent pair of shears that slices through paper like a hot knife through butter. They felt just right for my daily clipping project.

I wish I could write a dignified: “I quietly celebrated the day I found a new three hole paper punch.” Actually, I was quite silly. For years I had aligned a three-holed sheet of note paper as a template for double punching pages with a hand held paper punch to prepare pages to fit a three ring binder. Suddenly, one motion and I had a perfect punch every time! I thought it was great! My daughter quietly left the room as I gleefully repunched page after page in my notebook.

The day I announced I had found a wall mounted can crusher, she knew what was coming and just rolled her eyes. Her dad understood. He took it to the garage, screwed it into the wall beams and began crushing cans. A 100 cans later he came in, tired but happy, having had a serendipitous moment of entertainment and exercise.


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