The Great Glebe Garage Sale
But it was a round vintage jug at one table which caught my eye, a vision of drifting summer light with intense bursting blooms, as though a 1900 afternoon was caught in its luminous sphere and, of course, I purchased it. Because this jug transports me to a cabin in the quiet Muskoka mountains of Ontario, at a time when letter writing was still a matter of course, where a young lady wrote to favorite aunts and boarding school friends, next to such a jug which would have held a bounty of garden flowers. I look into the shimmer and I also enter directly inside this book I’m reading “ The Big House : A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home ” to experience for myself the orange Muskoka sunlight on the walls of the wood paneled arts and crafts cottage. Its calm, sighs, its creamy crockery, a screened porch where the family leaves the demands of the outside world to dream and grow more into themselves. 
We attended one garage sale some years ago where vintage picture frames lay in a pastoral landscape on the ground, giving the impression of having grown on a hillside. In the thin wavy glass and the patterned wood of those frames, I could see reflections of long ago bride and grooms with trailing bouquets full of roses and satin bows, of heady family vacations splashing around in the surf or wading in the tranquil lake, mom sitting on the shore near the cottage looking like a young girl in her one piece polka dot, the children attempting to float the dinghy. Photos that could have, must have, hung in a family summer home, one that is revisited every summer in reality or memory with its host of traditions and sacred places.
Was it surprising then that the two white haired ladies holding the sale offered us some sandwiches? We were only too happy to say yes. The simple homemade cheese sandwiches tasted of the quiet pursuits and calm retreats I had glimpsed through the contents of their home for sale.
From quiet echoes, these fragments of lives amplify to a voluptuous sound.