I never really liked summers in Connecticut. The heat and the humidity at sea level creates a swampy stew, with air so thick it sticks to you, like a spiderweb when you accidentally walk through it. All East Coast states became steam incubators in the summer; vats of slow-cooked primordial soup to birth mosquitos, cockroaches, and skin fungi.

I was sort of a killjoy about most summer activities. I hated day camp. I hated the beach. Fireworks were cool…but I hated, hated, hated family cookouts.

I did not gel with the harsh inconveniences of the outdoors; such a hostile, sweat-inducing environment was not for me…and worse of all, there were other kids my age out there. Gross.

By my early teens I spent the majority of my summers sitting in air conditioning and playing video games on my computer.

But despite being a cynical indoor kid, there was always one thing that would bloom in the summer that actually made me smile. Just as the warmer weather would bring flowers (and allergies) and bees (and bee stings), it would also bring the yard sales.

I would visit my father on Sundays, and it became a summer tradition to travel around the state, hunting for yard sales. He and his friends would search for used records and stereo equipment, and other miscellaneous electronics and yard tools. I would love going with them, hanging around strangers’ yards, garages, and sometimes their entire estates.

My father and his friends would also host their own big neighborhood yard sale every year, selling off the stereo equipment, electronics, and yard tools that they bought at tag sales the previous year and then sat in the garage collecting cobwebs.

It was always an event, and I’d enjoy helping cart everything from the attic and basement out into the garage and the yard, setting up the tables, arranging the items and tagging them. And I’d get excited to see the neighbors flock in the street, and seeing drivers-by see the sign at the end of the block and suddenly pull into our neighborhood.

“They’re coming! And they’re bringing their money!”

I wouldn’t fully understand the thrill of actual yard sale hunting until I was about 14 years old. Sure, I enjoyed going to sales with my dad and just hanging out, but I didn’t understand what it was like to search for something I wanted and to find it.

Once upon a time information was stored on thin 3.5 inch cartridges; computers would have drives for these cartridges, and they would contain games and other “programs,” which is what we called “apps” back in the 1900s.

PC games that were hundreds of megabytes in data would come on several cartridges, and though today this may all seem so mildly inconvenient and unnecessarily encumbered with plastic, this system worked just fine…until CDROM was invented.

In the mid 90s the CD-ROM was revolutionary. Compact Discs were capable of storing so much more information; games could have full motion video now, meaning washed up live actors could show up in your video game during cheaply produced cutscenes.

All I wanted was a CD drive for my rundown PC so I could play Command & Conquer and fight fascist shadow governments in a resource war with my friends. But a brand new CD drive was not easy for a 14-year-old to afford, considering lawn mowing and light season-dependent landscaping were my only revenue source.

In these days, the best option for a poor young gamer to get what they needed for their PC to even run these games was to cannibalize used PCs discarded by rich people and create a Frankenstein monster of a computer.

Growing up in Fairfield County, Connecticut, where a high percentage of the 1% live, I found yard sales and estate sales were amazing opportunities for those of us living in the one low-income housing neighborhood in the entire county.

Even “trash week,” when municipal garbage trucks would pick up larger, otherwise prohibited items, was like a second Christmas.

Every summer the local Boy Scout troop would organize one giant yard sale as their main fundraiser for the year – which the Boy Scouts really needed, considering we couldn’t peddle cookies, like some other organizations, and selling tins of popcorn around the holidays just wasn’t cutting it.

It was a gargantuan sale, truly a feast for the collector, the bargain hunter, the upcycler, the artist, the connoisseur. Whether they’re a gearhead or Deadhead, all kinds from all across the region would come to the yearly event, knowing that they would find something in their wheelhouse.

A lot of kids my age were hoping for bikes, hoping for athletic equipment, skis for trips to Vermont. I had $40 and a single-minded goal. I wanted a used PC husk with an intact CD drive…maybe with some extra RAM or a sound card, but I wasn’t going to push my luck.

My father and I would raid the Boy Scouts’ tag sale together every year. It was a tradition, so much so that even though I lived right down the street from the location of the sale, I would hold off from going to the sale on Saturday, waiting until visiting with my dad on Sunday, even though he lived in the next town over.

I still remember the surge of excitement when I found exactly what I was looking for at the Boy Scouts’ tag sale. I found my 2x CDROM, and spent the rest of that summer indoors and making dumb “deals” with my friends to pay halfsies on computer games.

The CD-ROM was useful for about six months, before it became obsolete and I needed a 4x CDROM for better performance.

In my twenties, when I moved into my own shabby apartment with my own shabby friends, yard sales, estate sales, and trash week became essential for survival…once we got sick of sitting on milk crates.

I remember each item, each treasure I procured by such means. I remember the hideous 70s monstrosity of a couch, all brown, yellow, and orange paisley. My friends and I found it in a full mansion estate sale, in the billiards room. It was so horribly nicotine stained that the majority of the yellows in the color palette were found actually to be white.

I remember the randomness of finding someone’s Jackie Chan VHS collection, the perfect additions to my own growing collection. I remember finding the big, leather chair on the side of the road, during trash week, in one of Connecticut’s many gated communities.

That free chair would become my computer chair for many years, which I would sit in at my $5 used computer desk, to play on my Frankenstein computer, in the cool air provided by my $15 used air conditioner.

All of this comes to mind whenever the warmer weather hits and whenever I see tables being set up in driveways and on lawns, heralding the start of Yard Sale Season.

I may not need yard sales for my survival anymore, but I’m still a hopeless man-child with an addiction to collecting physical media, and I have two stepsons in their 20s who are always in need of something useful and cheap.

Luckily, the Peak to Peak area is full of opportunities this time of year. From the Mountain Coalition for Youth Yard Sale, which begins Friday, May 31, 2024, at the Nederland Community Center, to the Sugarloaf Garage Sale supporting the Sugarloaf Fire Department, to the ever-popular huge Mountain Forum for Peace sale every year – hunting down great sales with great deals that are raising funds for great purposes is easier now more than ever.

Check out our Garage Sales Special Listing Page for more information!