Yard sales and cuddly kitties

Today Erik and I spent almost the whole morning and half the afternoon at yard sales, and this is what we came away with:

$4 – original December 1963 issue of Life, covering JFK’s funeral
50¢ – three spools of thread in dark turquoise, light turquoise, and dark brown
$3 – three Eyewitness Books (remember those from your childhood?): Skeleton, Seashore, and Castle
$4 – terracotta planter shaped like a wide bowl
$1 – a dozen lemons from someone’s tree
$1 – two terracotta plant pots and 1 fake-plastic-terracotta square planter
$2 – small wooden crate with sliding lid
$1 – five random magazines, and one of my favorite books from my childhood: Sunset‘s Children’s Rooms and Play Yards
$1 – yellow Pyrex mixing bowl exactly like the one I already have and grew up with (I’ve seen tons of these Pyrex bowls in yard sales, thrift shops and antiques stores, but for some reason this is the first yellow one I’ve ever found)
$1 – Balderdash board game (the new version!)
$1 – two Japanese bowls big enough for big big bowls of soup, yellow-swirled with a white border
$1.50 – medium red-brown pottery footed bowl, perfect for holding onions and garlic on our counter
$1.50 – CDs: a six-disc Mingus set, Brahms cello sonatas performed by Mtislav Rostropovich and Rudolf Serkin, Schubert and Schumann Fantasias played by Maurizio Pollini, Shostakovich and Glazunov violin concerti played by Itzhak Perlman and conducted by Zubin Mehta
75¢ – two paperback books for reading: Bee Season to replace my copy that I can’t find, The Kite Runner
75¢ – two books for making collages: a little pamphlet called The Treasures of the Uffizi Gallery, and a hardbound New Reference Atlas of the World from 1929

Amazing!!! We didn’t even set out to go yard-saling this morning; we just went to the little farmers’ market in downtown Pinole (it’s on Pear Street, isn’t that poetic? near Plum St, Prune St, and Peach St), and all this happened. Luckily I’d brought my hat for the market, but I need to start carrying SPF lip balm around with me. Every time we’re out in the sun for this long, my lips feel extra-sensitive afterward (and not in a good way!).

We also saw a cool metal breadbox, a complete set of cake pans in graduated sizes for baking a wedding cake, a set of mini loaf pans, a gorgeous big ceramic ewer, fishing poles and bait (the man says he catches sturgeon with these! in “the delta,” which initially confused me because I thought he meant Mississippi until he said Antioch), a music stand, an electric keyboard, electric drills, a potting table, crates full of American history books (I initially ran away, but did eventually go back and look through them — nothing of note), what looked like a miniature cement mixer, lots and lots and LOTS of kids’ clothes and toys, bicycles, a serving bowl decorated to look like a soccer ball (ugh), multiple cheap plastic blenders, and — not for sale — two adorable fluffy cats, one white and one calico-spotted. The white cat ran away when it saw us, but the calico ran toward me. I knelt down and it put its paws on my knee and stood up to head-butt me. I petted it and told it enthusiastically what a lovely cat it was, and it purred and licked my hands and even tried to stand up higher on my knee to CUDDLE. When the white cat saw that we weren’t mean people, it also came over and allowed me to pet it. We left the cats to go to a huge multi-family yard sale around the corner, and when we came back, the calico cat was resting in the shade — but when it saw me, it came running at full speed! And repeated the earlier performance of standing on my knee and cuddling. It was the most ridiculously sweet, cuddly kitty I’ve ever met, and it was smart, too; each time we had to leave, it understood and didn’t try to follow, and after Erik knelt down too, I told the cat to go to Erik, and it actually did. It jumped down from my knee and walked over to hang out with Erik. Such a sweet floofy kitty. Also quite dirty from living outdoors, but I petted it anyway, until my hands felt like they were covered in dust and grime. And that was the highlight of my day.