I hate yard sales. I get irked just thinking about strangers buying entire tabletops of my memories for a measly few bucks. My partner, however, loves yard sales. They represent all that’s good about America and capitalism.

So, on the kind of morning poets have laid waste to entire forests trying to describe, I found myself sitting behind a rampart of folding aluminum tables, bracing for the onslaught of yard sale enthusiasts.

They would soon be trampling across my front lawn. The same front lawn, by the way, that by mid-July looks like a miniature replica of the Oklahoma dust bowl. Of course, I’m sandwiched between neighbors with lawns that could appear on the cover of Better Homes & Gardens.

In an effort to keep up with the Joneses and Smiths (not their real names) I paid several hundred hard-earned dollars to replace the old dirt with expensive, exotic, nutrient-rich topsoil. Add some fertilizer, top-shelf grass seed, and by mid-July my front lawn still looked like the dust bowl. The difference is that now when it rains, I can literally watch my money go down the drain.

My partner had been planning our yard sale for weeks. Planning is in her nature. She’s AAA — not the auto club, the personality type. She organizes everything right down to REM sleep. I’m a type C-minus. We show signs of life during televised sporting events and — well, there is one other time.

The perfect day was the heavenly sign she had been waiting for all miserable winter long. While I had been out in the snow shoveling my back into spasms, she had been inside mentally cataloging every item we owned. Now, with the planets aligned, it was time to sell our stuff.

Beside the fact that I never aspired to a career in retail, I don’t know why yard sales provoke me. The best I can figure is that it has something to do with growing up in the city. Yards in my rowhouse neighborhood were just that: a few yards of concrete. Until I went to college, the only grass I saw were the stray sprouts hardy enough to push up between the cracks in the sidewalk. I never even heard about yard sales. But to my partner, it was our patriotic duty to foist our old things onto any sap muddled-minded enough to buy them.

That’s not to say there isn’t a formula to a successful yard sale. Any devotee will tell you that a good sale hinges on having the right mix of junk, uh, collectibles. My partner followed two simple rules in making her selections:

1. Had we used the item in the last 48 hours?

2. Did it belong to me before we met?

In less than an hour, our front lawn looked like the set for a sequel to “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” For yard sale aficionados, it was a visual pheromone, a primordial urge. They swarmed our front lawn like bees to flowers, like flies to … never mind.

My partner spoke their tongue like a native. I don’t like talking to strangers, particularly ones with the wide-eyed, wild look of a serious shopper let loose in a house of bargains. I mostly just stood there acting like I’d never seen any of these things before. Sometimes I mustered a big, dumb smile, artfully dodging encounters with buyers.

Buyer: “Do you know ...?”

Me: (Vacant stare followed by loopy smile.)

Buyer: “Never mind.”

I was finally forced into the retail breach by a woman lugging $10 worth of gimcrack, gewgaws and baubles, enabling her to furnish a small, if somewhat tacky, house. She cornered me between a table and a tree. With nowhere to run, I turned to face her.

The assault began. Was the Curly Joe mug missing from the Three Stooges collection, she wondered? And did we have the accompanying Shemp coasters? I parried her thrust with my best, “sorry, not my table” look. Undaunted, she wanted to know if the fondue set had all its forks. I didn’t know we had a fondue set.

Frantic, I hit her with every expression of incompetence and befuddlement at my command. I started with the D’s: dumb, dense, dull, dimwit. Nothing worked. When I reached vapid, I heard her say she couldn’t possibly pay $2.50 for a vase that two days prior was housing flowers in our kitchen window. The best she could do, she said, was maybe, maybe $1.50.

From across the yard my facial fireworks must have looked like I was having a seizure. My partner rode to my rescue and got two dollars for the vase. Dazed and exhausted, I headed for the refuge of my favorite old lawn chair. I was just about to sit down when a woman in a broad-brimmed sunhat snatched it up and toddled off. It sold for $3.

H.R. Drumond is a Montgomery County writer.