Hidden Treasure

This afternoon on a walk among the twenty-five houses that make up our village we came upon a sign for a yard sale. It urged us onto private property we would not normally have entered. There was no longer a crowd or evidence of a sale, but the front door opened and a friendly face invited us in, even with our dog. We’d missed the sale, but the welcome was beyond resisting. There were books left, our weakness, lots of books, old ones. An early copy of Leaves of Grass had been sold, the owner said, to a man who told her he didn’t know much about books. We were envious, but we left with a contemporary mystery story by Henning Mankell, A Mencken Chrestomathy from 1937, and a much-used copy of More Language That Needs Watching: Second Aid For Writers and Editors, by Theodore Bernstein, a New York Times editor until 1950. The owner of the house was herself the wife and daughter-in-law of newspapermen and resisted our effort to pay.