When I woke up on Saturday, I knew it was not going to be the best day to find a “dig,” or possibly a blog post, or even an article. I had actually checked the night before to see if there were any sales in the area and was hopeful when I found a lone estate sale listed in Danbury.

The snow had been falling since 3 a.m. and the prediction was for 3-6 inches, maybe more, maybe less. Looking out the window, I figured the day was lost to finding anything, except lower back pain from shoveling.  

My wife doesn’t drive in the snow, but cares about her clients, and when she asked for a ride to work, I thought, “What a team we make!” I could unwittingly protect her foolish desire to work and she could unwittingly satisfy my selfish desire to dig through the past. There was a glimmer of hope that this sale would still be on and that it would be worth the trip.

After dropping her off at work, my daughter and I began creeping up a slick and busy West Street, and as we reached one of the last side streets before the highway, we saw the sign. The side street was even worse than the main road, but just a few houses away the sign by the corner of the driveway told us we had arrived.

A snow-covered person assured us that the sale was still on and invited us to begin looking. This was new territory for me, aside from digging in a minor blizzard; I don’t often fall into the “early-bird” category. This was a too tidy, small home from the ‘50s that had been cleaned to the extent that no digging was possible. Even the garage was devoid of mid-century scraps of memorabilia.

What you won’t see in the pictures is that I did eventually find something. After an hour and a half of digging through the sale and with the snow falling heavily, my wife deciding to end her day early. I realized that I had nothing to remove the snow and ice from my car. I asked if there was snowbrush for sale. The person running the estate sale checkout turned to his partner who said, “Yup, there’s one in the garage… it will run you about $200.” They settled for $2.

Visit the blog to see a British company selling… LSD in 1952.

Greg Van Antwerp is a Brookfield resident and blogger, who can be found on the weekends in search of a good “dig” or a good story.  You can read more about his adventures by visiting his blog.