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haunt the thrift shops and snap up the best items before any poor and working class people even get a chance to shop there. And there are a lot of those people selling stuff online now, including used clothes and accessories. I have a friend who sold used clothes on eBay for a while. She spent tons of time in thrift shops and at garage and rummage sales stocking up her “eBay store”. She eventually gave it up because she said there was way too much competition, both to acquire decent clothing cheaply and then to sell it online for a good profit. Apparently, a fair amount of people who didn’t want to go back to an office after the pandemic are trying their hand at this now.

I’m guessing that the organizations, like Goodwill, who run the thrift shops, realized who their new main customer base is (people who want clothes to sell not people who need clothes to wear) and the thrift shops raised their prices to what the market would bear.

We didn’t dwell on it but it did cross our minds. I actually felt much less “safe” in my mom’s suburban Florida house than I do in Brooklyn. It’s just so isolating how few people we saw around. We went days without seeing another person unless they were a friend who intentionally came over. Most people there drive into their garage and then go straight into their house and never come out until they back out of their garage in their cars. We knew a few of her neighbors but didn’t see them much.

A garage sale would have been a lot of work to put together. And we didn’t think it was worth doing unless we were going to make some serious money. Like maybe $500 or more. So yeah, a couple of women with a pile of cash at the end of a garage sale day might be tempting to some punk addict with a gun. So basically, we didn’t feel like it was worth doing unless we made enough cash to make us possible sitting ducks.

That said, we swam in the pool at midnight without closing the sliding door to the patio. Oh sure, I checked for alligators before getting in the pool at night in the dark. And seriously, I am absolutely certain that, if we had locked ourselves out of the house accidentally, we would have been able to break in pretty easily. The house was never broken into while we were there or while we left it empty (of people not things) for 6 months before selling it. But the house across the street was burglarized while the woman was home sleeping. That said, we slept there for 5 weeks, often with the bedroom window open. Fear can be very subjective and irrational.

Absolutely. Good karma can be earned in many ways.

We ended up spending our time foraging for sentimental items that we wanted to keep, reading my mom’s journals, going through and dividing up her music and photographs, reminiscing, etc. She had a ton of nice clothes. She was a real clothe horse who was still buying new outfits when she was 98. She had three closets stuffed with clothes, including one big walk-in closet. We didn’t even consider trying to sell her clothes. One day we invited a few of her church friends over to take all the clothes. Some were kept by her friends to wear themselves and the rest went into the church rummage sale. Easy peasy. At the same time, we spent hundreds of dollars shipping some stuff home like my mom’s paintings (ones she painted, not just owned) and a huge model ship that my dad built that took up the whole fireplace mantel. For some reason, we both relaxed a lot once we decided not to try to sell.anything.