The trip wasn't a total loss, though, because our ultimate destination was Fredricksburg Trade Days, a sort of flea market that is held once a month between Fredricksburg and Stonewall, Texas where you can find acres of "Antiques, collectibles, tools, crafts, shabby chic, primitives,ranch furniture, hunting accessories, candles, unique clothing, jewelry, food and so much more." The Trade Days is a pretty cool place if you like shopping for eclectic decorations and yard and garden art. Add free beer and free live music from The Drugstore Cowboys and it's a great way to while away a sunny (but damn windy) weekend.
Wandering through small town festivals, antique stores and flea markets is one of Ellie's and my favorite activities. My wife mostly looks for cheap primitive decorating items, either for the house or to add “whimsey” (her view; I don't quite see it that way) to her side of the garden. (OK, I should probably explain here that my old girl and I have way different views of how a garden should look. So after years of heated debates over what should and should not be in the garden, we divided the backyard into her half and my half. My half is pretty much intended to look as natural as possible while her half is full of “whimsey”.) Anyways... she scours thrift stores and flea markets for things she can turn into decorations. For me it's all about the condiments.
Condiments are one of the major exports of Texas. If you can't find a salsa, syrup, chowchow relish or pickle you like in a Texas gift shop or flea market then you are just too damn picky. Because if it can be made with jalapenos, habaneros, prickly pears, peaches, mangoes, agarita or whatever, we've got it here and, since I've never met a condiment I didn't like, I'm a happy guy.
It was about lunch time when we got to the flea market so we chowed down on brats and sauerkraut and free beer (at least in my case, Ellie's more of a Diet Coke afficianado) and listened to the Drugstore Cowboys for awhile. Then we hit the booths and barns for a couple of hours. Ellie got a vintage Easter tablecloth and some other decos and I picked up some herbs and a hanging tomato plant and a jar of Mrs. McArthur's Apricot-Pineapple Pepper Jelly. Our purchases show kind of the ups and downs of buying stuff at flea markets. My wife only paid $7 for the tablecloth, which was a big one in great shape. I paid the same amount for a little 16 fl. oz. jar of jelly. So she got a good deal and I probably paid more than I would have in a regular brick and mortar store; but like I said, I'm a condiment guy, so I'm not complaining.
One of the booths at the Trade Days had used, rebuilt garden equipment like tillers and such. I always wonder when I see these things if I didn't own one of them sometime in the misty past. See, I used to do all my own machine maintenance. When I had a tiller or edger or something that wasn't working, I used to tear the engine down and rebuild it. As I got older and went from regular glasses to bifocals to trifocals to progressive lenses, I found that it was difficult to see well enough to do a lot of the machine work that I used to do. So I'd end up shoving a non-working mower into the shed and going down to Wal~mart to plunk 125 bucks down on a new one. Eventually the shed got pretty well filled up with probably-still-good but not-working-right-now stuff.
Pretty soon the old girl and I started having some heated debates about the non-functional power tool collection. I tried to convince her that it was just "whimsey" but she wasn't buying it. So I thought about having a garage sale to get rid of it, but my experience with garage sales has been less than positive. Craig's List didn't appeal to me either for pretty much the same reason. So then I thought I'd just donate the old power tools to Goodwill or someplace; but then I discovered that most of those places aren't interested in whimsical gas-powered used-to-be-useable machinery. Finally, one night when I was putting out the trash, I decided to put a couple of old weed trimmers out to see if the trash man would take them. Bright and early next morning I went out to check on whether the trash man had decided to take my old power tools and what to my wondering eyes should appear but an overfull trash can with no power equipment near. It seems that someone else had picked up the old trimmers.
In the ensuing weeks I tried the same thing with an old lawn mower, another trimmer, a broken bandsaw and one of those heavy metal sprinklers that looks like a tractor and crawls along a hose (when it works). In each case the old tools disappeared before the trash man made his rounds. I had discovered the Trash Metal Fairy! I got all excited and tried a couple of times to stay up so I could see what this amazing creature looks like but each time I either fell asleep before he got there or didn't get up in time to catch him. The closest I got was a Christmas card from somebody named Raul that was taped to my trash can one morning after I had put out the bandsaw the night before. I don't know what the Trash Metal Fairy does with all my old power tools but whenever I go to a flea market I have to check out the used power tool booths just to see if some of my old stuff has been reincarnated there.
Ellie and I had a good time at the Trade Days but eventually we were shopped out so we decided to try one last time to see some wildflowers. We drove a short way down the road from the Trade Days to a place called Wildseed Farms where they grow wildflowers in order to sell the seeds. Usually that's a great place to see wildflowers but this year they only had one field of red poppies growing. So we bought a bag of seeds to grow our own flowers this fall and then we gave up the wildflower quest and headed home.
Even though we didn't see any wildflowers, it was still a fun adventure. Now I just have to find some french-fried mushrooms to eat with my apricot-pineapple jalapeno jelly.
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