HANOVER — For the first time since 2019, the Dewey Field Parking Lot was filled with all manner of items looking for new homes and hundreds of people looking to take treasures home on Saturday during the Hanover-Dartmouth Community Yard Sale.
Items on offer at booths arranged in four lines in the lot off Lyme Road next to the Geisel School of Medicine in Hanover ranged widely from books and chairs to glasses, games, skis, toys, clothing, a kayak and a rocking horse.
Kelly Bergeron, of Norwich, became the proud new owner of a large red kite adorned with a white daisy. She said she was drawn to it by the bright color and when she learned from the seller it was just $2, she was sold. The seller told her it had been her now-14-year-old’s when he was 6.
Bergeron, who came with her daughter, said her family typically comes to the event annually.
“It’s a good place to find stuff,” she said. “You see people you haven’t seen for a while.”
Organizer Susan Edwards, who is retiring from her role as chairwoman of Sustainable Hanover’s recycling subcommittee this fall, was busy making deals with customers at her own booth on Saturday.
“It’s so much fun in one sense,” she said in between sales. But in order to sell her own items, which included handcrafted potholders, candlestick holders and leftover crafting supplies, she “had to be super-organized,” she said.
It was hard for her to let some of the sewing items go because of their sentimental value, she said, but there’s a “limit to what you can use.”
The clear skies and sun on Saturday were no surprise to Edwards, who said the weather has been the same since she launched the event, in collaboration with others at Sustainable Hanover and in the Dartmouth Sustainability Office, 13 years ago.
Given her upcoming retirement, Edwards said the yard sale’s future is in question. It “might not happen next year,” she said.
But this year’s event at least was a celebration of sorts. Hanover resident Lynn Swett Miller, who also helped organize the first community yard sale, welcomed the return to normal evident from the bustling turnout.
For “two years we were off,” she said of the pandemic-related hiatus. It’s “so nice to see it going again.”
Though not vending this year, Miller said she remembered selling a box of Legos that her children no longer used to a young family another year. It was “just like heaven” for the young boy of about 6 who took ownership, she recalled.
Donna Ron, of Etna, attended the event with her family for the first time on Saturday. She had arrived at the parking lot only recently but had already found an ice cream cone costume for one of her children, making an early start to their Halloween preparations. The family was examining a pile of dolls and stuffed animals on offer at another booth.
“This is pretty cool,” Ron said.
Nearby volunteers for the Hampshire Cooperative Nursery School, which is located just up the road off Route 10, also known as Lyme Road, next to the Dartmouth Organic Farm, were selling baked goods and children’s items to raise funds for the school.
Heather Hopley, of Lebanon, said her youngest child, who is 4, is in his last year at the school this year. Noting the generosity of the students’ parents in providing items for the booth, Hopley said she is hopeful it will be a good year for the school.
Now that masks are optional at the school and even the young students now qualify for COVID-19 vaccines, Hopley said “it does feel like things are more back to normal.”
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
