Sidewalk Season

In Toronto, the streets are paved with free stuff. People put things they no longer need but is still in good nick out on the sidewalk with a sign that says “free” and that item will usually disappear within hours. When we put a new kitchen in our old house (and by new, I mean salvaged from our friends’ old kitchen), we took the stove out to the curb and it was literally gone by the time we went back into the house.

At the same time, we have got some amazing things from the side mart. It’s like the “take a penny/leave a penny tray in a convenience store. There’s even a term for finding good things on the street in online forums like Craigslist and BUNZ: curb alert.

I’d been cutting back on sidewalk finds because we simply do not need more things in our house. Even if they are free, the cost of clutter is high. But in the last couple of weeks, the cosmos offered up a few things that I could not refuse.

The biggest score was a copy of Madonna’s “Sex” book. I remember when it came out. My colleague David Livingstone has one and I remember that we all treated it like a fetish object. Now it feels like a relic (in the churchy meaning of the word).

I also found this Dansk “Iron Crown” candelabra. My parents had this exact same candle holder in our old house. Somewhere I have a photo of my young hipster mom and dad modelling their groovy late sixties threads standing in front of it.

I have also found some more practical finds, such as a nice gig bag for Mr. Andrew’s acoustic guitar, and some Kenyan pottery and a hand carved giraffe candlestick that I can fix up and sell in the Earnestine Etsy shop.