Garage Sale Hell

Jill's Journal: A lot of people love a good garage sale. God bless ‘em. I’m not one of them. The only thing that sounds worse to me than attending a garage sale is actually hosting one. For years, I’d pack up anything that needed to be discarded by our household (but might be useful to someone else) and happily donate it to Goodwill or some other organization. But with the large volume of possessions we’ve needed to disperse in the last few months, we’ve now had a few garage sales and planned for one last big one yesterday.

I braced myself to get through this grand finale, but when it poured rain until sunrise and left us with a soggy lawn, we decided to take advantage of our later closing date and shift it to next Saturday instead. So, yesterday we just set out a few tables of saleable items while we cleaned the garage.

If having a garage sale is a small piece of torture for me, here’s where my own personal hell comes in. A group of Jehovah’s Witnesses showed up and wouldn’t leave. I’m all for people sharing their faith, but these people were aggressive and intrusive…and somehow ended up inside my house. NINE of them. INSIDE my home.

We treat our house as our own private little sanctuary from the world and it can be hard for me sometimes to have people I like inside my home, so having a group of strangers that I was already uncomfortable with invade my house made me crazy. And it was like herding cats. I’d make a push to get them out the door and they’d push right back. It was like they’d staked their claim and weren’t going to budge.

When a few of them stepped in between me and the children, I got very anxious. When Victoria started crying, I’d had it. Mama Bear came out. I told them in no uncertain terms that they had to get out and get out now. Rob was outside trying to deal with legitimate customers and he said every single one of them apologized to him as they filed out.

I had to laugh about it when it was over because I’ve somehow turned into my Mother. When I was young, we used to live in a neighborhood where Jehovah’s Witnesses paid very regular visits. My Mom must have spent hours politely trying to get rid of them and one time, out of frustration, called the pastor of our church to come over and help her deal with them. But they still came back. My Mom hated those knocks on our door and when she saw them coming, she finally started hiding all of us in a back bedroom until they stopped knocking and went away!

I used to think that was so funny – why not just tell them you’re not interested and stop letting them waste your time? But they got me this week. If they come back, I might lock the door and hide in a bedroom too...