By John W. Forssen

Kennebunk Resident

Collectively, they’re bigger than any of the big box stores; the variety is infinite and the bargains are beyond belief. All you need is a little time, gas in the car and a modest streak of good luck – especially the last – because the competition can be daunting.

On any given weekend, if you’re up with the sun, there’s hardly a thing in this world that you can’t find in somebody’s front yard.

Garage sales – sometimes referred to as Maine’s phantom economy – are everywhere, proof positive that one man’s trash is, indeed, another man’s treasure, and that few things in this world ever truly wear out. Nothing is useless in the shadow of dire need or rich imagination.

Years ago, they were called rummage sales because that is the manner in which one goes through another’s belongings – one rummages, an aimless kind of search prompted as much by curiosity as need or expectation – and they were held mainly in the basements of churches to support the various causes of sponsoring women’s auxiliaries. At least that’s my earliest memory of them.

I was 7 or 8 years old at the time of my first rummage sale. My mother, who was responsible for one of the tables, had given me 75 cents and permission to find something for myself. It was an unusual privilege – about as close to independence as a 7-year-old could hope for – and I started off through the aisles of tables, dodging this way and that among the press of adults, feeling both wealthy and self-important.

What caught my eye was a huge canvas mail carrier, stiffened and frayed with age, its leather trim brittle and its brass fittings well-tarnished. How the owner must have hoped to be rid of it. She may even have seen me coming, as they say. I doubt today that I would find it huge, but then, able to hang my chin comfortably at table’s edge, I could imagine crawling into the thing, my secret place, the dream of every 7-year-old boy I have ever happened across. I would sleep in it; I would lock away my treasures in its several zippered pouches – one of which, I noticed with a shiver of excitement, was fitted with a small lock.

At first, I walked away unwilling to part with my three quarters too easily or, as might also have been the case, uneasy about approaching a stranger (we were taught to be wary) or, yet again, the possibility that I would learn to my dismay that something as valuable as an-about-to-be-discarded mail carrier would be far more expensive than my small fortune could accommodate.

I did not walk far, however; for, as soon as I turned my back, there arose another fear: that someone else would come across it and, throwing caution to the wind, purchase it on impulse – stealing, in effect, what had by then become my dearest possession.

The woman at the table was a kindly sort. When she smiled I could imagine her keeping a plate of chocolate chip cookies for the children in her neighborhood. She told me that I was big for my age and that the mail carrier, of all the things on all the tables, was just perfect for a boy like me – at which point, the three quarters held tightly in my fist, I extended my hand and opened my fingers, one at a time.

She considered for a moment, glancing alternately at the mail carrier and the three coins shining in my open palm; and then, without a further word, she reached down and, and as delicately as a humming bird taking pollen from a flower, she took away just one of the quarters.

Such a grand moment it was – although to our surprise when we got home, much of what my parents had donated and hoped to be rid of, someone had stuffed into the mail carrier. Unexpected bounty.

A similar experience, though not as successful, happened to a little girl one recent weekend at a garage sale in West Kennebunk. There was a small stuffed dinosaur on one of the tables to which she took an immediate liking. The fact that she misidentified it as a lizard is not important.

“Can I buy the lizard?” she asked her mother who was preoccupied with an array of china pieces, comparing them, looking for chips.

Paying little attention, she replied, “You don’t need a lizard.”

The little girl clasped her hands to her chest, brought her elbows into her sides and with a grimace replied, “Oh, but I do, Mother. You know I’ve alway needed a lizard.”

Just how many little girls might similarly have been disappointed by that dinosaur no one knows – but, for that matter, no one knows how many garage sales there are on any given weekend or how much revenue they generate.

There is however, a tax document entitled Instructional Bulletin No. 9, in which the state makes clear that there is a difference between garage sales, which it defines as casual and infrequent, and something of a more recurrent nature that might be described more accurately as a retail operation, regardless of its appearance. The former is not taxed. From the latter, however, the state expects its cut.

At the very least, given all of the garage sales, yard sales, barn sales, tag sales that occur throughout the state each weekend, it would be difficult not to imagine some hundreds of thousands of dollars changing hands on a fairly frequent basis.

Collectively, garage sales are big business.

They are also a marvelous means for recycling.

And they are great social events, opportunities to meet people and catch up on local gossip.

As for impulse buying, they can’t be beat. On what amounts to pennies a day, you can shop till you drop, stocking up for your own garage sale.

Unless, of course, you find yourself pacing hungrily around one of the occasional big ticket items – like the loam sifter out on Route One north of Kennebunk. It’s shaped enough like the little girl’s dinosaur to be its mechanical big brother, and most people, when they see it, have to ask what it is and what one might do with it.

It sports a huge circular brush atop its crane-like neck, a height of 10 or 12 feet above the ground, and beneath its huge belly, its digestion is served by a rock crusher.

According to Mitch Boudreau, who is selling it for a friend, it’s used at construction sites to screen top soil from the under-burden of gravel and other debris.

Mitch says a lot of people have stopped to ask about it. “One fellow from Vermont thought he could use it for bear-baiting,” he said. “Another thought it might work as a street sweeper.”

With a price tag of $8,000, however, it might best be used as a loam sifter.