Trade Day

We have this wonderful event that happens every week in our community.  It’s called Trade Day.  A lot of people who have lived here their entire life have never gone.  There are people who live in Missouri or Illinois or Tennessee and wouldn’t miss it for the world.  It is an event.  It is a throw back to days that were held years ago where people would take what they had to trade or sell, set up at the fairgrounds and wait for someone to come and buy it.  Some things are priced.  Others are haggled.  Some are traded.  It is a site to behold.

Jimmy goes as often as he can.  He needs to have a few dollars in his pocket in case he sees something he can’t do without.  Some days he comes home with tomato or pepper plants.  Later in the summer he comes home with tomatoes and peppers.  He always comes home with a head of cabbage.  It seems that our cabbage isn’t ready yet or it’s over ripe.  Anyway, he’ll see some that looks better to him and he’ll come home with those.  Every once in awhile he’ll find and buy a used baseball glove because it was broken in and didn’t cost as much as a new one.  If he can find a good cast iron skillet (or dutch oven, oh my!) or a well worn butcher knife, he’ll bring those home.  He won’t give too much for them, maybe $8.  Sometimes I wonder if he always starts with that number when he’s haggling.  Of course, he’s not the only one who goes.  I love to go with him and the kids have learned everything they will ever need to know about negotiating at Trade Day.  I have seen each one of them with $10 in their pocket and after a little while they have to make at least one trip to the car to store their treasures.  That’s a thing too.  If you’re walking down the aisles, holding your treasures, you run the risk of someone coming up to you and asking you if it’s for sale.  If you tell them that you just bought it they want to know for how much and then they’ll offer you $1 more than you paid.  I heard a guy say “if I wanted to sell it I wouldn’t have bought it in the first place”.  Jimmy took an old meat cleaver that he had bought at his uncle’s estate sale up to an Amish guy who cleaned up knives and cleavers and such.  As he was walking that cleaver back to the truck when he picked it up a guy stopped him and asked him if it was for sale.  He told him it wasn’t.  The guy asked him if he knew what he had.  Jimmy knew that it was a cleaver that his dad and uncles had used when they sold barbecue pork and mutton at the Fancy Farm Picnic.  There wasn’t much need for it anymore since the meat is boned out and sold by the pound.  The guy told him that he had one just like it but it didn’t have the original handle.  He said Jimmy’s had the original handle.  He said that he could date it back to the early 1800’s.  Jimmy knew that he wasn’t going to sell it for sure then.

I was walking through Trade Day with my daughter Katie once and we were mainly window shopping.  But sometimes window shopping can get expensive.  Not with Katie.  If you tell her what you want and how much you want to spend she’s on it.  We were looking for some old quilts to use as backdrops for a friend’s senior pictures and before we made a turn Katie had found some.  She was very casual with the guy.  She looked over quite a few things and then asked him what he wanted for the quilts.  I think he had $10 on one and $20 on another.  She talked with him for a while.  Before we got ready to head out she asked him if he would take $8 for both of them.  Well, I knew that he was going to turn her down flat but he said “sure” and we walked around with those antique quilts the rest of the day.  She reminds me all the time that those quilts are hers because I wasn’t willing to give the guy the $30.  Of course if I try to talk someone down she gets mad at me.  She says that I’m mean about it.  I don’t think I’m mean about it.  But she gets a lot better results than I do.

We’ve only set up for Trade Day once.  I did a major purge at the house and decided to have a yard sale.  I had one on Saturday of Labor Day Weekend.  I did okay but still had a lot of stuff to get rid of.  Jimmy suggested setting up at Trade Day.  It only costs $5 to set up and I thought that would be worth it.  I didn’t have my stuff priced so I told people I had two prices:  little stuff was a quarter and the bigger stuff was $2.  I made $300 that day.  No lie.  It was Labor Day weekend so the place was covered up.  In fact, we had to set up along the back road of the Fairgrounds.  But people came back there.  And they bought all kinds of junk.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Flea Market Flip on HGTV but it’s a pretty cool show.  Recently I was at Trade Day and there was a woman who had her “booth” set up like Flea Market Flip.  I asked her if she had ever seen the show.  She said that she had but she didn’t flip her stuff, she said she just supplied the raw material.  We got to talking about doors and windows and she said she had a couple of older guys going around small towns and such and picking up every old door and window they could find and she couldn’t keep them.  She explained that she set up in Nashville and people would buy them as fast as she could set them up.  I believed her.

Last weekend I went with my daughter to Lebanon, TN to the Country Living Magazine Fair.  I had wanted to do that for several years.  As soon as I walked in there I thought “oh my gosh, this is just like Trade Day but a lot nicer!”  There were all kinds of vendors set up, most of them having flipped their flea market finds.  I also found out that “but a lot nicer” meant more money.  Some of those people were really proud of their finds.  That was okay because some of that stuff was well worth the money.

But don’t you know that I can’t wait to go back to Trade Day to see what kind of treasures I can find, and what I might be able to do with those treasures.  You should put going to Trade Day on your bucket list.