Awhile back, Nan at Letters from a Hillfarm posted a photo of the most inviting Adirondack chair. It brought to mind a pair of weathered Adirondacks I saw for sale at the local thrift shop - they were $36 for both. I decided to sleep on it and stopped back the next morning, only to find them gone, their two marks still left in the grass. That day I vowed to never let that happen again - if I see something I love and can afford it, it comes home with me immediately.
I read about a similar experience in one of my favorite books - Garage Sale America by Bruce Littlefield. I don't buy many books because I'm always visiting the library, but this one I loved enough that I needed to own it. Here's his tale of "the one that got away."
There's nothing worse than the one that got away. It haunts you for weeks like a bad dream, eats away at your psyche like a termite on softened wood. I recently found myself attracted to a delicately aged pair of Bert and Ernie puppets sitting on the lawn of an otherwise innocuous sale of miscellany. My brother and I had them growing up. Ernie slept on the bottom bunk with Brian; Bert slept up top with me. I didn't buy them, leaving them to be taken by some more thoughtful brother, and I've regretted it ever since. It would have been fun for me to send Brian an Ernie with a mysterious note - definitely worth the ten bucks. It was a real missed opportunity, and I try not to let those happen too often.
-Bruce Littlefield
"The sky is like old blue denim just before dawn, with one round hole worn through, exposing the cold bony knee of the moon. I have been hearing the trilling of tree frogs. That frog - even one with the chirp of a bird - would live in a tree (not even in but on) , clinging with little suction cups to keep from falling, is the height of craziness, but forty feet in the air, light as leaves, their tiny hearts are slow and steady under kite paper skin, and their black eyes shine with moonlight. Let us praise all who ascend to such high places ont he sheer face of the world."
