Essays by Ann Hood, Howard Mansfield, and Aaron Angello
JULY 5, 2026 - ISSUE 07
In this issue
Howard Mansfield ponders the meaning of yard sales;
Aaron Angello recalls a childhood pet;
Ann Hood reappraises her parents’ food truck.
On Going Late to Yard Sales
by Howard Mansfield
Everyone will tell you to go early to a yard sale, but I recommend going late. You won’t come home with many treasures, but you will walk away with a glimpse of the riddles that are other people’s lives.
In the last hour of a yard sale, the sellers are exhausted. They may be remorseful about what has sold and what remains. They have a look of soporific regret, much like the dullness that follows gluttony. They are not cleansed by losing some useless things. Rather, they seem exposed, as if their junk — old chairs and blenders — was off with the new owners telling secrets on them. They have put part of themselves in boxes out on the driveway, and watched themselves scatter to the winds. They are surprised. They had just put stuff out to sell and now they feel diminished and judged. Late at yard sales, they sit trying to decipher the verdict.
Here are the “object-secrets” of a house outside in the sunshine, the intimate now public. They still retain a touch of their domestic duty, the marks of wear and use. Once they were commodities, one of a million produced in a factory, then they were possessions, and now at a yard sale they are a third thing, existing in uncertainty. Some of these things are on the cusp of being trash; some have gained value as a fetish, a prized collectible.
What we are seeing at yard sales are moments of uncertainty. It’s as if the driveway or barn or garage sat on a seesaw. Are we witnessing the end of an empire, the breakup of a marriage? Is someone decamping for another dream-vector, another fate-center on the map? Is the rest of the seller’s life as bereft of grace as this driveway selection?
I remember two houses in particular. Each yard sale marked an ending, one happy, one not.
At the happy place, my wife and I arrived after the owners had nothing left to sell. It was an old farm and the couple was in their late sixties. We got to chatting: their family had raised chickens, goats, sheep, horses.… They’d done it all, and now they were moving on. They had come to New Hampshire in the 1950s, after the Korean War, and it had been a good life, the woman told us, and she smiled as she said this. She had the poise not to be disappointed by her yard sale; she could let go.
The unhappy house was easy to spot. It was a house divided — half of it painted a chocolate-bar brown, the other half a thin, sloppy white, like skim milk. The line where brown met white was rough and ran from the foundation to the eaves.
At the sale, only a few heavy objects were left, including a dubious avocado-green refrigerator and an air-hockey table that weighed more than our car. A man and a woman (husband and wife?) sat there, silently in different spheres.
We edged quietly back to our car. The house was sour with old anger.
“What do you think happened there?” my wife asked.
“Kaboom,” I mimed, moving my hands wide apart.
If you go early to a yard sale, pushing in during the Oklahoma-land-rush frenzy, you may find some bargains, but you will miss the puzzles that are left when the boxes are nearly empty.
A Handful of Cloud
by Aaron Angello
Once, when I was very young, I was riding in the car with my parents. We were driving along these winding mountain roads between Cripple Creek and Victor. As often happens on these roads, we drove into a cloud that sat heavily on the ground like a patch of mountain fog. My father excitedly rolled down the window and yelled back to me, “Aaron, quick, grab a handful of cloud!” I reached both of my hands out the window, into a particularly dense bit of cloud, and cupped them around it. “Do you have it?” “I think so.” I pulled my hands back into the car, making sure there were no gaps between my fingers from which the cloud could escape. I held the cloud in my hands for the entire ride home. Once home, I ran into my room and stowed the cloud in the top drawer of my dresser. For more than a year after that, I would spend hours in my room playing with what I’d come to refer to as my pet cloud. I never named my pet cloud, I just called it my pet cloud. It couldn’t really do anything other than be a pet cloud, but neither can a pet fish or a pet hamster or a pet turtle. I think I really loved my pet cloud. But as often happens with the things we love as children, my pet cloud became increasingly less important to me. I played with it less frequently. It eventually became just a part of the stuff that was in that drawer. Sometimes I’d not even see it when I looked into that drawer for something else. Eventually we moved, and I lost track of it entirely. Maybe I’ll find it someday, in an old box of trophies, report cards, baseballs.
Sausage on Wheels
by Ann Hood
Long before the Dessert Truck and Kogi Korean BBQ and the Grilled Cheese Grill, before the Mighty Cone and Frysmith, there was Sausage on Wheels.
No one would ever call my parents trendsetters. My father wore Harris tweed to work as the operations manager for the IRS in Government Center in downtown Boston, and flannel shirts and jeans on weekends. My mother still favors Liz Claiborne for dressing up. Other than the Italian food my grandmother made, we ate the staples of the 1960s: meatloaf made with Lipton dried onion soup, canned vegetables, hot dogs and hamburgers cooked on the backyard grill. My parents drove Chevys, watched Hee Haw; they drank whiskey sours and Michelob, line-danced and played Bingo. Yet in 1979, my safe, predictable parents bought a truck, converted the cab into a kitchen, and sold sausage-and-pepper sandwiches and meatball grinders from it.
I had forgotten about Sausage on Wheels because, I admit, their business venture had embarrassed me. I was twenty-two that year and trying on a new self, a more worldly and sophisticated one. I drank Chablis and wore Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. I dated young lawyers who drove Porsches and took me to dinner at expensive restaurants. I lived on the sixth floor of a soaring high-rise on the waterfront in Boston, just one T stop from Logan airport, where I was based as a TWA flight attendant. How could two parents who drove a truck to a flea market every Sunday to sell sandwiches ever fit into the world I was so carefully trying to create?
But one summer many years later in Portland, Oregon, I followed a map carefully marked by the hotel concierge to a parking lot where people sold food out of their trucks. I stood, surrounded by trucks selling Wiener schnitzel sandwiches and sushi and Thai noodles and Mongolian beef and sliders and tacos. Truck food was hot. It was hip. The trend was spreading east. On that sunny day in that parking lot, I remembered Sausage on Wheels and the energetic hope and pride with which my parents ran it.
Sausage on Wheels made money. Not enough for them to quit their real jobs working for the IRS, but enough for them to take trips to Las Vegas, to give both my brother and me down payments for houses. “Even if it didn’t make a dime,” my father told me, “I would still do it. I love it that much.” I smiled tightly while he dreamed of expanding. “Couldn’t you see a Sausage on Wheels downtown?” he said, his eyes gleaming. “All those people on their lunch breaks?” I could imagine it, and the idea made me shudder. What if someone recognized them?
My parents never did expand. Instead, life got in the way. In June 1982, my brother, Skip, died suddenly. A few days later, we sat, stunned, on the back porch of our house. Sausage on Wheels was parked in the driveway. My father got up and went into the house, returning with the restaurant-sized bowl he used for mixing the meatballs. My mother joined him as he went back to the kitchen. Together, crying, they sliced peppers and onions and rolled hundreds of meatballs. The next day, they drove the truck to the flea market to sell the food they’d made.
I have a picture, a Polaroid, of my parents smiling out from the truck on its first day in business. The words SAUSAGE ON WHEELS are painted in fat letters on the side. They are happy and proud, holding sandwiches out the window. When I look at that snapshot, I wonder what they would have thought had they been able to see the future: the food trucks parked everywhere in cities across the country. Or perhaps they would be satisfied that in their ordinary way, they taught me something extraordinary. That even in grief, we must take tentative steps back into the world. That even in grief, we must eat. And that when we share that food with others, we are reclaiming those broken bits of our lives, holding them out as if to say, I am still here. Comfort me. As if with each bite, we remember how it is to live.
Credits
Howard Mansfield has written extensively about history, architecture, and preservation, exploring our place in the world. The New Hampshire-based author has a new book forthcoming in October from Lyons Press: Invisible Monuments: Tribute, Memory, and the Summoning of the Past. The above piece is from his essay collection, Summer Over Autumn: A Small Book of Small-Town Life (Bauhan Publishing, 2017).
Aaron Angello is a poet, essayist, and playwright, who teaches creative writing and theater at Hood College in Maryland. The above essay appears, under a different title, in his genre-bending book, The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications (Rose Metal Press, 2022).
Ann Hood knits, cooks, and travels, and writes about these and much more. Currently based in Manhattan, she is the author of fifteen novels and four memoirs, as well as middle school and YA books. The above essay is excerpted from Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food. Copyright (c) 2019 by Ann Hood. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Photos by Betsey Henkels