The Yard Sale Sign That Made Us Friends

There was a hand-painted sign face-down in the ditch at the end of my driveway for the third time that week, the paint I’d let dry overnight was smeared where somebody had dropped it lettering-side into the wet grass, and I already knew whose gardening gloves had done it.

Her name was Sue-Ann Prewitt, and she lived in the tan house with the flag out front and the flowerbeds edged so sharp you could have shaved with them. I was fifty years old that summer, a warehouse forklift man twenty-six years at the same distribution center out on the county road, married to a patient woman named Kathy who had watched me paint that sign at the kitchen table for two evenings straight and had said, gently, that maybe I should just print one at the office instead. But I did not want to print one at the office. I wanted the one I made, the one with the sunflower in the corner that Kathy said looked more like a fried egg, and the letters that said YARD SALE SAT 8AM BIG STUFF CHEAP with an arrow pointing down our street.

I am Doug Renner. I have lived on Sparrow Lane in a heartland town you have never heard of for going on nineteen years, in a gray house with a garage I could not park a car in because it was so full of the accumulated evidence of a life. Sue-Ann had lived four houses down for at least as long, and in all that time our relationship had consisted of me waving and her not quite waving back, and one memorable exchange at the mailbox where she informed me that my recycling bin had been at the curb eleven hours past the acceptable window. I had thought of her, up until that summer, as the woman who ran the homeowners’ association like a small and joyless country. I had not thought of her as somebody I would one day sit beside in a lawn chair and cry with. But that is getting ahead of the story, and this story earns its ending, so let me tell it in order.

The sign

It started because I needed to clean out the garage.

Kathy had been after me about it for two years, in the way a person is after you when they love you and also cannot find the ice cream scoop because it is somewhere behind a broken air compressor. We had raised our son in that house and he was grown and gone to a city three states over, and the garage had quietly become the place where everything we could not decide about went to wait. There was a treadmill nobody had walked on since a New Year’s resolution I no longer remembered making. There were four bicycles for a family of three. There was a box of VHS tapes and no machine on earth to play them. It was time.

So I decided to have a yard sale, and because I am the kind of man who believes a thing worth doing is worth doing with a hand-painted sign, I painted one.

I spent two evenings on it. I found a scrap of plywood in the garage, which was fitting, and I sanded it and primed it and painted the letters on in the good outdoor paint, the kind that costs too much, and I put a sunflower in the corner because our son’s mother, my Kathy, likes sunflowers, and I figured a sunflower said friendly. It said, in letters I was proud of, YARD SALE SAT 8AM BIG STUFF CHEAP, with an arrow. On Wednesday evening I walked it out to the end of the driveway and pounded the stake in and stood back and looked at it the way a man looks at a thing he made, and I felt good.

By Thursday morning it was gone.

I figured it had blown over. It had not blown over. I found it face-down in the ditch, and when I stood it back up I noticed the stake had not broken. It had been pulled, cleanly, by somebody who did not want to break it, only to move it, which somehow felt worse. I pounded it back in. Friday morning it was in the ditch again.

I am not a suspicious man by nature, but I am not a stupid one either, and by the third time, the time the letters got smeared in the wet grass, I had my suspicions, and my suspicions had a tan house and a flag.

The note

I did not go knock on her door, because I am from a place and a generation where you do not knock on a door about a thing like this. You handle it obliquely. So I painted the sign again, better this time, and I laminated a note in a plastic sleeve and zip-tied it to the stake, and the note said, in my politest hand, “This sign is announcing a yard sale, a time-honored American tradition. It will come down Saturday afternoon. Kindly leave it standing until then. Your neighbor, Doug.”

Saturday came before an answer did. We had a decent sale. Kathy ran the money box and I hauled things out and we made just over two hundred dollars and got rid of the treadmill to a young couple who I hope are happier with it than we ever were. And Sunday, in my mailbox, folded once, was a note back.

It was written on stationery. Actual stationery, with a little embossed border. And it said, in handwriting so neat it looked typed, “Mr. Renner. The Sparrow Lane Homeowners’ Association guidelines, Section 4, prohibit handmade or non-uniform signage as it detracts from the uniform aesthetic of the neighborhood. A pre-approved template is available upon request. This is a courtesy notice. Sincerely, Sue-Ann Prewitt, HOA Standards Committee.”

I want to tell you I read that note and felt anger. I did not, exactly. What I felt, reading the words “uniform aesthetic” about a sign with a hand-painted sunflower on it, was something closer to a challenge. Kathy read it over my shoulder and said, “Douglas, let it go.” And I looked at her, and I said the thing that I think, looking back, actually started the whole war.

I said, “Kathy, I have never in my life let anything go, and I am not going to start with a woman who owns embossed stationery.”

The escalation

Here is what I did. I did not fight her on handmade signs. I painted a sign that was, technically, not a yard sale sign at all.

It was a sign that said WELCOME TO SPARROW LANE, with a sunflower in the corner, and under that, in smaller letters, EST. WHENEVER, POP. FRIENDLY. And I planted it at the end of my driveway, and I waited.

It lasted a day and a half. Then it was in the ditch, and there was another piece of embossed stationery in my mailbox, this one citing Section 4 again and adding a note about “decorative signage requiring committee pre-approval.” So I painted another one. This one said HOME OF DOUG, WORLD’S OKAYEST NEIGHBOR. That one made it two days, and I think it made it two days because taking it down would have required Sue-Ann to admit she found it funny, and I have since learned that admitting a thing is funny was, for Sue-Ann, the hardest admission there is.

Then she did something I did not expect. She put up a sign of her own.

Hers was, of course, professionally printed. It was tasteful. It was a soft sage green and it said, in a font that probably had a French name, “Please Help Keep Sparrow Lane Beautiful.” And it was planted, deliberately, directly across the street from mine, so that anybody driving down our street got both messages at once: my hand-painted claim that I was the world’s okayest neighbor, and her tasteful sage-green implication that I was, personally, making Sparrow Lane less beautiful.

Kathy said, “Oh no.”

And I said, “Oh yes,” and I went to the garage to find more plywood.

The whole street picks sides

I would like to be able to tell you that this stayed a private matter between two neighbors. It did not, because nothing on Sparrow Lane stays private, and a sign war visible from a moving car is about the least private thing there is.

The first person to take a side was a fourteen-year-old named Petey Halloran, who lived across the street and two down, and who came over one Saturday while I was priming a fresh board and asked if I needed help. Petey was at that age where a boy has more energy than uses for it, and a summer stretching out in front of him with nothing in it, and I think the sign war was the most interesting thing that had happened on Sparrow Lane in his entire conscious life. I said sure, he could help, and I handed him a brush, and Petey became my lieutenant.

Petey had ideas. Petey was the one who suggested that instead of painting one big sign, we paint a series of small ones, like the old Burma-Shave signs his grandfather had told him about, spaced out down the street so you read them one at a time as you drove. I did not know what Burma-Shave signs were, so Petey explained them, and I thought it was the best idea I had heard in years. So we made a set. They said, one word or two to a board, spaced ten feet apart: THIS / IS / STILL / A / FRIENDLY / STREET / SUNFLOWERS / WELCOME. And we planted them the length of my frontage, and by the time we finished, three other kids from the neighborhood had shown up to watch, and a man named Rick from the blue house had come out with lemonade, and it had, without anybody deciding it should, become an event.

Sue-Ann responded with a second sage-green sign. Then a third. She was, I will give her this, relentless and well-funded. But she was one woman with a printer, and I was, by that point, a man with a lieutenant and a growing volunteer army of bored children, and there is only so much a single tasteful printed sign can do against eight hand-painted boards that spell out a sentence.

The street divided, good-naturedly, into camps. There were the Sue-Ann people, mostly the folks with the tidiest yards, who thought I was being ridiculous, and who were not entirely wrong. And there were the Doug people, mostly the folks with kids and dogs and a certain fondness for chaos, who had gotten tired of the HOA and saw in my sunflower a small flag of rebellion. Somebody, and to this day I do not know who, printed up little paper sunflowers and started taping them to mailboxes. Somebody else, a Sue-Ann partisan, printed up little sage-green squares. By the Fourth of July you could walk down Sparrow Lane and read the whole conflict off the mailboxes like a scoreboard.

The dueling yard sales

The thing came to its full ridiculous flower in August, when Sue-Ann announced a yard sale of her own.

I heard about it from Petey, who heard about it from his mother, who heard about it from the group text. Sue-Ann Prewitt, the very woman who had taken down my hand-painted yard sale sign three separate times, was having a yard sale, and she had, of course, ordered a professionally printed banner for it, sage green, that read “Estate Curation and Vintage Sale” in that same French-named font, because Sue-Ann did not have a yard sale, she had an Estate Curation.

Kathy said, “Douglas. Do not.”

And I said, “Kathy. I have to.”

So I announced a yard sale of my own, for the same Saturday. And I painted a sign for it. And because I am not a small man, not in that way, I did not make it a mean sign. I made it a sign that said DOUG’S YARD SALE, ALSO SATURDAY, SUNFLOWERS FREE WITH ANY PURCHASE, and I got Kathy to help me start actual sunflower seedlings in little cups so that this would be true, so that anybody who bought so much as a chipped mug from me would go home with a sunflower plant, and I would not be lying on a sign, because a man should not lie on a sign even in a war.

That Saturday, Sparrow Lane had two yard sales, four houses apart, and the whole town came to watch. Petey and his lieutenants ran a lemonade stand in the neutral ground between us and did, I am told, better business than either sale. Cars lined both sides of the street. People bought my chipped mugs and my son’s old bicycles and went home with sunflower seedlings, and people bought Sue-Ann’s antiques, because I will admit her things were nicer than mine, and the whole thing had the feeling of a festival that two people had accidentally thrown by trying to spite each other.

And I thought, standing in my driveway that afternoon handing a little girl a sunflower cup, that this was probably the most fun I had had in years, and that I did not fully understand why, and that some part of me did not want it to end, and that I did not understand that either.

I would understand it soon. Because that was the Saturday that the thing I did not know about Sue-Ann Prewitt came out, in front of the whole street, and it changed everything, and it is the part of this story I have thought about nearly every day since.

The thing I did not know

It was late afternoon. The crowds had thinned. I was folding up my card table when I noticed the commotion at Sue-Ann’s end of the street.

An older man in a golf shirt had pulled up in a car, gotten out, and was standing in her driveway, and even from four houses away I could tell by his posture that he was not there to buy antiques. It was her brother, I would learn later. And what he was doing, in that loud, wounded way that family reserves for family, was standing in the middle of Sue-Ann Prewitt’s Estate Curation and Vintage Sale and asking her, in front of everyone, how she could do this. How she could sell Mama’s things. How she could put Mama’s china and Mama’s chair and Mama’s good silver out on a table with little masking-tape price tags on them like it was nothing.

The street went quiet the way a street does when a private thing becomes public. And I saw Sue-Ann Prewitt, the woman with the embossed stationery and the sage-green banner and the sharp-edged flowerbeds, stand very still in the middle of her own driveway, and I saw her face come apart.

It was not a vintage sale. It was her mother’s estate. Her mother, who had lived with her in that tan house for the last four years of a long decline, whom Sue-Ann had cared for alone, cooking and bathing and lifting and sitting up nights, while the rest of the family sent cards. Her mother, who had died that spring. That spring. The same spring I had been out at my mailbox getting annoyed about a sign in a ditch, four houses down, Sue-Ann Prewitt had been burying her mother and going home to an empty tan house for the first time in four years, and I had thought of her only as the woman who ruined my yard sale.

The whole neighborhood aesthetic she had been so fierce about. The uniform lawns, the pre-approved signs, the rules, the embossed courtesy notices. I understood, standing in my driveway with a folded card table in my hands, that it had never been about aesthetics at all. It was about control. It was the only thing a woman who had watched her mother disappear inch by inch could still control. If the lawns were perfect and the signs were uniform and Sparrow Lane looked exactly the way it was supposed to look, then something in her world was still holding, still tidy, still hers. My hand-painted sign with the fried-egg sunflower had not detracted from the neighborhood aesthetic. It had detracted from the one thing keeping her upright.

Her brother left. He got back in his golf-shirt car and drove off, and Sue-Ann stood alone in her driveway among her mother’s things, and the neighbors who had come to watch a fun little sign war did not know what to do with themselves, and one by one they drifted away, embarrassed to have witnessed it, and left her standing there.

And I put down my card table, and I walked four houses down the street.

The lawn chair

I did not know what I was going to say. I am not a man with words ready, I am a man with plywood and paint. But I walked down there, and I found Sue-Ann standing among her mother’s china, not crying anymore, just standing, in the particular stillness of a person who has run out of ways to hold themselves together and is simply waiting to see what happens next.

There were two lawn chairs by her garage, the folding kind. I did not ask permission. I unfolded one and I sat down in it, right there in the middle of her estate sale, and I looked up at her, and I said the only true thing I had.

I said, “That’s a real nice set of china. My mother had one like it. I never knew what to do with it either.”

And Sue-Ann Prewitt looked at me for a long moment, this man who had waged a summer-long sign war against her, this man she had every reason to tell to get off her property, and then something in her went loose, and she unfolded the other lawn chair, and she sat down next to me, and she started to cry in a way I do not think she had let herself cry since the funeral.

I did not say anything else. I have learned that this is most of what people need, most of the time. Somebody in the next chair who does not need you to be finished crying before they will stay.

We sat in those two lawn chairs until the sun went down. She told me about her mother. She told me the woman’s name was Opal, and that Opal had been sharp as a tack right up until the last two years, and then not, and that the not was the part nobody prepares you for. She told me about the four years, the nights, the baby monitor she had kept on her nightstand so she would hear if her mother got up and wandered, the way you can love somebody and also be so tired you cannot see straight, and how nobody warns you that the grief comes with guilt riding on its back, guilt for the nights you were tired, guilt for the times you snapped, guilt for the relief you felt when it was over, guilt for selling the china because you cannot afford to keep a house full of a dead woman’s things and also breathe. She told me the last thing her mother had said that made sense was to please keep the yard nice, because Opal had loved that yard, and Sue-Ann had taken it as an instruction and never stopped following it. She told me she had made all those rules because the rules were the only thing that stayed put. She told me she knew people on the street called her the sign lady behind her back and thought she was a joyless woman, and that she had not always been one, and that there had been a Sue-Ann once who painted and laughed too loud and left her own recycling bin out three days running, and that she did not know how to find her way back to being the other kind anymore.

And I told her about my garage. About how it had filled up with everything I could not decide about, and how the yard sale had really been me finally deciding, and how the sign had been me making the deciding into something I could be proud of instead of something that just felt like loss. And I understood, saying it out loud to Sue-Ann Prewitt in a lawn chair, that she and I had been doing the exact same thing all summer, from four houses apart, both of us trying to hold something together with our hands. She used rules and I used plywood. But it was the same thing.

Kathy walked down at dusk with a plate of leftover cookies from our sale and found the two of us sitting there, and she did not ask a single question. She just pulled up a third lawn chair and sat down and passed the cookies, and that is one of about four hundred reasons I married her.

What we built

Sue-Ann and I became friends. Real ones, the unlikely kind that are the best kind because neither party saw them coming.

She helped me clean out the rest of the garage, and she was ruthless about it, and I needed ruthless, because a man cannot let go of his own things but he can let another person be firm with him about them. I helped her, over that fall and winter, empty the tan house of the things she could not keep, one afternoon at a time, at a pace that let her say goodbye instead of just hauling. We kept the china. We did not sell the china. That first evening in the lawn chairs I had watched her look at those little masking-tape price tags on her mother’s dinner plates, and I had thought, a man should not let that happen. So the next afternoon I came down with a dish tub, and Sue-Ann and I washed every piece of Opal’s china by hand at her kitchen sink, and I dried while she washed, and we put it all back in her mother’s cabinet, because I told her some things you keep not because you have room for them but because letting them go is a different loss than you can carry that year. She peeled the price tags off one at a time and balled them up and dropped them in the trash, and when she got to the gravy boat she stopped and held it a while, and I did not rush her, and then she put it in the cabinet with the rest, and she shut the door, and neither of us said anything else about it.

She never took down another one of my signs.

In fact, the next spring, when I painted a new sign for the community garden that some of us started on the empty lot at the end of Sparrow Lane, Sue-Ann Prewitt looked at my fried-egg sunflower in the corner, and she got out a brush, and she painted a second sunflower next to it, worse than mine, truly worse, a real disaster of a sunflower, and she signed it, and she stepped back and looked at it and laughed, and it was the first time I had heard her laugh, and it is a sound I would go to some trouble to hear again.

The HOA, I should mention, quietly stopped enforcing Section 4. There was never a vote. Sue-Ann just stopped writing the courtesy notices, and after a while other people started putting up hand-painted signs, little ones, for lemonade stands and lost cats and free zucchini, and Sparrow Lane got less uniform and a great deal friendlier, and nobody mourned the uniform aesthetic, least of all the woman who had invented it.

Petey Halloran still comes by. He is sixteen now and drives, and he thinks he is too old for painting signs, but he is not, and every so often I get him out to the garage on some pretext and hand him a brush, and he pretends to be doing me a favor. He is going to be all right, that kid. He learned something that summer about how the person who seems the most rigid is often the one holding on the hardest, and that is not a small thing to learn at fourteen.

The chair I keep

Sue-Ann’s mother’s china is still in the cabinet in the tan house. I know because I have eaten off it. Sue-Ann has us over for supper now, Kathy and me, and she sets the good china, her mother’s, and she does it on purpose, because she told me once that a thing you keep is only worth keeping if you use it, and that she was done keeping things in cabinets for a someday that only ever turns into a sale. She learned that, she says, from a man who painted a sign.

I still have my first sign. The good one, the one I made the second time, after the ditch, with the sunflower that Kathy says looks like a fried egg and I have come to agree does look like a fried egg and I would not change it for anything. It hangs in my garage, which is clean now, and which has room in it for two lawn chairs, folded up and leaned in the corner, that I keep for a reason.

Because sometimes on a summer evening Sue-Ann Prewitt walks four houses down the street, and I get out the two lawn chairs, and we sit in my clean garage or out in the driveway under the sign, and we do not always talk. Sometimes we just sit. Two people who spent a whole summer at war over a piece of plywood, before either of us was honest enough to say that what we were both really doing out there in our front yards, four houses apart, was standing in the wreckage of what we could not hold onto, waving hand-painted signs, hoping somebody, anybody, would come down the street and pull up a chair.

I am very glad, now, that I put down the card table and walked down there. And I am even glad, in a way that took me all summer to arrive at, that she took my sign down three times. Because if she had left it standing, I never would have painted another one, and I never would have found out who she was, and I would still think the woman four houses down was nothing but a joyless country of one, when the truth was she was the bravest and loneliest person on Sparrow Lane, and all she needed was for somebody to sit down beside her and stay.

We keep two chairs for that now. Both of us do.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.