9/29/07 - Yard Sale Day in Druid Hills

The Druid Hills neighborhood is an exclusive enclave that borders to the north of my own neighborhood Lake Claire. While Lake Claire is often chided for not having any sort of lake, Druid Hills does not get critiqued for lacking actual Druids. What the neighborhood does have is elegant mansions, a private country club and high priced real estate. Its initial development was set around the estates of two scions of the Coca Cola fortune and a series of Olmsted designed parks.
Today Druid Hills is having their annual community wide yard sale. The last time I visited a major planned yard sale event was last summers world’s longest sale in Alabama. Wandering down elegant streets with ‘dale’ suffixes I realized that this was a world away from that Alabama sojourn.
If I recognized anything from the clutter assembled here it is that there are far more children in Druid Hills than I imagined. Perhaps here among the posh homes children are neither seen nor heard. Large plastic playscapes and other extruded over sized toys were at many of the sales. One home that had a particular overabundance of large plastic toys was selling them along with strollers and other child moving contraptions since the owners were moving to Singapore. I warned them not to allow their children to chew gum there. There were a number of things that seems out of place and time here. In the driveway of one home I found a copy of a Vanilla Ice game, in the driveway of another was a small wooden dinghy. Like most sales the amount of women’s clothing far surpassed the little that was offered for men. In a number of yards Halloween items were placed among the clutter. One thing that I did see in the aforementioned Alabama sale was red hats. The type that older women wear as a defense against growing old and boring. I do not know if these represented a failed attempt to stop age and boredom or if someone was expelled from a red hat club for being old and boring. These and other items are depicted below.


Children's stuff left behind by soon to be Singapore expats.














Fine vases atop plastic chairs.













The magic of Vanilla Ice captured in a game.
















Red headgear no longer desired.
















A ticking clock and a game of midlife crisis.














A drum and riding boots on an upscale street.
















Guitar and rain boots offered for sale.














A bed covered in clutter in the driveway of an Italinate manor.











A small boat waits for a buyer in the Druid Hills.