Flea markets are where lazy people go when they want to go yard-sale-ing.
No driving all over the place or trying to find parking in some snotty residential area that frowns on yard sales.
No GPS errors that take you to the wrong Chowder Drive.
No regret wishing you’d bought the table that was 12 miles back.
At the flea market, everything is in one place. The longest you have to walk is 300 yards. Parking is right there. And the vendors have done the hunting for you.
There are a few flea markets on the Cape – in Wellfleet at the drive-in, in Sandwich, near the skate park off Quaker Meetinghouse Road; Saturdays at new Hyannis Arts Hall behind Main Street, and various pop-ups in church basements or community centers.
I headed to the Sandwich Bazaar Flea Market early one recent Sunday morning because I needed a button for a knitting project. Anyone over 65 has a box of buttons in their house. My buttons are in a 70-year-old toffee tin with a picture of a newly crowned Queen Elizabeth on it. But I didn’t have the right button. And all those boxes of other people’s buttons are starting to get passed on and end up in flea markets.
The Sandwich market is spread over an area at least the size of a football gridiron at Oakcrest Cove Field and operates from April through October. By 8 a.m. there were over 100 vendors already vending. What time did you get here to grab such a prime spot, I asked a man whose table was only a few steps from the entrance. “Last night,” he answered.
The one disadvantage to a flea market is that it can be overwhelming - yard sales are bite size. Flea markets are like seeing the whole cake and having to consider which icing flower to snag.
Here are some things I could have bought but didn’t: Valentine Barbie, dressed for the holiday; a large, empty, metal potato chip can; a 19th-century French box that might or might not have been French or 19th century; baseball cards of players I’d never heard of; enough fishing gear to outfit a fleet; a Nevada license plate that read “playboy”; garden fish created out of forks and glass plates; a vintage Handy Andy carpenter tool kit ; a pair of cowboy boots; cotton draw-string pants; a portable typewriter I might have owned in 1966; and a lot of china that looked like it came out of my basement. In fact, I probably should be a vendor not a shopper.
Here’s what you should bring to a flea market: a good sun hat, water, cash and your own bag. Here’s not what to bring: any assumptions. “I hope you find what you are looking for,” one vendor said to a shopper. “No matter,” the shopper replied, “I didn’t come with high expectations.”
Exactly. Because that’s how discoveries are made.
I wandered among the tables looking for buttons. I finally found a woman selling them by the bagful, but nothing suited the project I was trying to finish. So I was meandering toward the car, my heart a bit sad because no one likes to leave a flea market without a purchase. Then I spotted the chairs.
They were wood, painted-green with striped-canvas-slung seats, the kind you might see in a movie filmed on the French Riviera. They were perfect for a new shaded seating area in my back yard. Very portable, even suitable for the beach, if a bit heavy by today’s standards. “They’re in really good shape, even the canvas,” the vendor said. “Probably 1950s,” he said. Perhaps. More likely modern knock-offs. But they were in really good shape and $45 for two stylish chairs – heck, you can’t hardly do that at the discount store.
So I bought them. Because that’s how flea markets work. You go looking for buttons and you end up with a straw hat or a dozen Matchbox cars or a copy of Life Magazine with the second – not the first – installment of a 1965 best-seller. Or you buy a pair of chairs that bring you joy every time you go into the back yard.
So happy hunting. Look for me. I’ll be there looking for a button.
