It’s easy to scoff. What idiot, after all, would buy a used 2005 wall calendar featuring a dozen photos of Céline Dion? But the savvy shopper will recognize that this eight-year-old castoff, now lying on a garage sale table for a quarter, will be useful again in 2022, and 2033 and 2039, and 2050. Céline’s heart will, in fact, go on and on, ad infinitum.

We love buying and selling our junk, over and over like some frantic game of musical chairs. And while thrift stores may beckon us year round, summer is when we seem most anxious to sell our discarded and faded flotsam and use the proceeds to buy other people’s scratched and dented jetsam. Summer is the time for garage sales, auctions and flea markets, and of the latter, it’s difficult to imagine any more impressive than the one at the Lachute Farmers’ Market, a little more than an hour’s drive away, where each Tuesday more than a mile of vendors start setting up their tables of wares at three in the morning, and the serious pickers arrive by six.

To find what? You could fill the Internet listing everything there. Clothes? Well, sure, but that includes wedding dresses, cowboy boots, army surplus and priests’ vestments (There is, in fact, enough religious paraphernalia on hand to start your own church, including a pew, bibles, statues, holy water bottles and the outdoor sign from St. Henry Baptist Church, in case you’re looking for a name). Toys? Yes. And antlers, books, clown paintings, dolls, engines, football helmets, games, handkerchiefs, insect spray, jiggers, keys, lamps, mink stoles, nutcrackers, outboard motors, pith helmets, quails, raquets, skulls, toboggans, uniforms, violins, waffle irons, xylotomous tools, yardsticks and a zither, and that’s just one run through the alphabet.

Here, in no particular order, are a dozen odd finds from a recent visit, as well as their asking prices:

1. A five-foot long light-bulb sign that once lit up the front of a general store: $125.

2. Bags of dental tools: $5 each.

3. A suit of armour: $150.

4. A bearskin rug made from a cub: $200.

5. A 120-year-old painting depicting Jesus and the devil having a discussion: $35.

6. A children’s board-and-dice game called Boating In Contrary Winds: $5.

7. A toy metal riding horse from 1947: $450.

8. A live pheasant: $125.

9. A canvas stretcher: $20.

10. A box of Linguaphone record albums, with which to learn new languages: $35.

11. A 1927 General Electric Hotpoint stove and oven, working: $450.

12. A former marching band drum turned into a coffee table: $195.

bdeachman@ottawacitizen.com