Worcester in March, and the Sales That Get Rained Out

Nobody tells you when you get into the estate sale business that you’ll spend half of March refreshing a weather app like it owes you money. Most of what I sell lives outside for the two or three days a sale runs, tables in a driveway or a garage with the door up, and Worcester in March can’t decide what it wants to be from one Tuesday to the next. I’ve set up a full driveway of furniture and glassware under a clear sky at eight in the morning and had to throw tarps over everything by eleven because the forecast lied to me, again.

Had one a few weeks back, a nice split-level out toward the edge of town, family had been putting it off for months and finally just wanted it done. First day went fine. Second day we got rained out by early afternoon, and I mean really rained out, not a drizzle, the kind where the driveway starts pooling and you’re hauling boxes of books back inside two at a time hoping the cardboard holds. Lost maybe a third of a day’s worth of foot traffic. The family was understanding about it, more than I probably would’ve been in their position, but it’s still money that doesn’t come back around.

The part nobody warns you about either is what a wet spring does to paper goods specifically, which is most of what I actually care about pricing. A box of books left too close to an open garage door for twenty minutes in a surprise shower is a box of books I’m now selling at half price, water damage doesn’t announce itself right away, it shows up as a curl at the corner three days later once everything’s dried. Same with the board games, and I check those corners now the way some people check a tire for wear, out of habit more than active worry most of the time.

My father used to tell me, back when I was first learning the trade under him, that you plan the outdoor sales around what the almanac says and then you plan again around what actually happens, because those two things agree with each other maybe half the time in this state. He wasn’t wrong. I’ve gotten better at reading the sky myself over the years, less reliant on an app, more on just stepping outside and looking at what the clouds are actually doing over toward the reservoir. Doesn’t mean I get it right every time.

There’s something almost tranquil about the mornings that go well, though, the ones where the weather actually cooperates and it quiets down like a blanket of snow settling over the whole street before anyone’s shown up yet, just me and the tables and the coffee going cold. Those mornings are why I keep doing this even in a month that tries this hard to talk me out of it. April’s better. April’s always better. I just have to get through the sale two weekends from now first, and the forecast for that one is already looking like exactly the kind of nothing I can’t trust.