It’s a crisp Saturday afternoon and I’m brooding over an old typewriter. It’s a Smith Corona, just like I had as a kid, and it could be mine for 10 bucks.

So many questions. Do I need a manual typewriter? Should I dicker over the price? Furthermore, now that I’ve been standing here gawking at it, am I under some obligation to buy?

I’m at my very first lawn sale and man, am I out of my league. Everything I know about lawn sales you could fit into a shoebox alongside the gleaming white golf shoes that can be yours for just 15 clams.

Fortunately, I have Suze Bilodeau around and Suze is a veteran of lawn saling. When she moved back to Maine from Florida, she pretty much decorated her apartment with things she bought at lawn sales. Suze knows her way around. Suze is my lawn sale Sherpa.

My first lesson?

“If you’re looking for something specific,” she tells me, “you’re probably out of luck.”

Too bad, really, because I’m in rather desperate need of a wireless router. I should be at Best Buy or Staples, but I’m not. I’m on somebody’s front lawn on Pond Road in Lewiston, picking through items that used to be somebody’s treasures.

“You never know what you’re going to find,” Suze tells me. “So try to look at everything.”

Oh, look! A DVD copy of “Hammy’s Nutty Fun.” And, hey! How about this woman’s wig, roughly the shade of a brand new penny?

There’s a set of snow tires, a vacuum cleaner and about a dozen lamps scattered across tables that are strewn with fallen leaves. The nice couple in charge of things are sitting in lawn chairs, watching me. I’m more confused then ever. Do I talk to them? Ask them questions? Say nice things about the wig?

“It’s different from one lawn sale to the next,” Suze tells me. “Some people are really social. Others will leave you alone. It doesn’t matter, anyway. You’re just looking for things you want to buy.”

Oh, if only it were that simple. The world of lawn sales is a culture all its own. People will tell you there are no rules, but there are. Unspoken rules and matters of etiquette to be observed.

Lawn saling is also a skill, or an art. If you know what you’re doing, you might go home with a car full of treasures all for just a few bucks. Trust me, Bub. There are a lot of people who know how to lawn sale. You should learn from them, but never try to beat them to the carnival glass if that’s what they have their eye on.

Gerry Thompson, a Poland woman and veteran of the scene, sent me off with a whole bunch of tips for my first excursion. You better believe I took notes.

“You need to know how much an item costs new before you buy anything,” she told me. Which is helpful, because I know that a decent router is going to cost between $40 and $200 dollars. Not that I’m going to find one at somebody’s lawn sale, mind you.

“Better neighborhoods have better stuff,” Thompson continues, “if you are looking for household items. I recently bought a vintage caned chair for $2, which is a deal in anyone’s book! Barn sales are great for antiques. If you want antiques, go early — dealers are looking for them too.”

Excellent advice, Gerry. I really app–

But Gerry is not done.

“I watch for cast iron,” she says. “It can be rusty (but that’s OK) if you know how to season it. Chairs should not be wobbly. Dressers or other furniture can be refinished. I like to do that myself, much cheaper than sending it out to be done. Check glassware carefully for chips and cracks. Bedspreads and quilts should not be stained unless it is small and you are going to cut it up. I am a seamstress who makes crafty items for resale. Make sure no fabric smells musty or has mildew on it. Check any zippers, and all buttons should be intact unless you don’t mind replacing all of them — matching them is impossible. I once bought an old atlas for $20 and resold it for $280 on eBay.”

OK. I think I have all I need to –

“Children’s toys should not be broken,” Thompson goes on. “I stay away from electronics. Oh yeah: Vintage and antique furniture likely has lead paint if it is painted, so that may be a good thing to keep in mind. Good luck and happy saling.”

Easy for Gerry to say.

A (very) brief history of lawn sales

Depending on who you ask, the lawn sale is pretty much the same as its other incarnations, specifically the yard sale, garage sale, rummage sale and thrift sale. Around here, we call them lawn sales in large part because they are typically held – wait for it – on somebody’s front lawn. Got it? Good.

Lawn sales probably date back to primitive man, when neanderthals would put no-longer-wanted rocks and dented clubs in front of their caves for the consideration of other knuckle draggers. For our purposes, let’s say it goes back to the early 1800s, when shipping yards would put out unclaimed cargo and leftover warehouse items at discounted prices. These sales, usually held on the docks, were known as rommage sales. Cool, huh? Read more about the evolution of yard sales: http://dailyinfographic.com/the-evolution-of-the-yard-sale-infographic

End history lesson.

I never did buy that Smith Corona on Pond Road, and Suze likewise passed on several items that failed to tempt her. Although a few items came close.

“I don’t know how I got through 41 years,” she said, for instance, “without a sparkly hairbrush.”

It could have been hers for a quarter.

But there were more sales in store for us in Lewiston. We drove up Pond Road and saw three or four signs for additional yard sales. Up and down the side streets there were at least a half-dozen more. Webster Street, Webber Avenue, Farwell, Sabattus, Campus, College and Main. A lawn sale here, a lawn sale there, a lawn sale damn near everywhere.

Clearly finding them wouldn’t be a problem. But as we forged on, I continued to fret. I’ve always thought of regular lawn salers as an elite group – black belts, if you will, of a sport played out on front yards in virtually every neighborhood across the land.

But perhaps I was being paranoid, overestimating the prowess of these hawk-eyed hagglers. To find out, I turned to Susan Weber, a school teacher who happens to go at lawn sales like a shark in freshly chummed waters. Turns out I wasn’t being paranoid.

“I go every Friday and Saturday unless my second job prevents me,” Weber says. “Occasionally I have to go to a wedding on a Saturday, but I always stop at sales on the way to and fro. . . . I buy all my school supplies and am a warehouse for all my colleagues. There is nothing I don’t own. I get shopping lists from people and I know what all of my friends collect, so I can pick stuff up for them. I am currently looking for pirate gear for the drama club.”

OK, Mrs. Weber qualifies as an expert. So I asked her for some tips – just a a few quick observations, mind you, about the art of lawn saling.

“I can tell you everything about it from pricing to dickering to good finds to rip-offs,” Weber began. “I even have a rating system – zero is a neighborhood that I don’t go to; one is a drive-by, two is a walk-through (quick in and out without even talking to the seller), three is a friendly visit without purchase, four is regular purchase, five is a killing!

“You would die if you went with me (and my hubby – he hunts down old vinyl records) because I have rules!” Weber continues, and here come those rules. “No back-tracking – highly evolved, efficient route that covers the Twin Cities between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. I jump out while the car is slowing to a stop and start scanning while he parks.”

Here I raised my hand. Are lawn sale enthusiasts nice to each other, Mrs. Weber?

“We have a sub-vocal system of letting each other know if a price is too high, negotiations are in order, or if it’s time to circle around and slip out,” she explains. “Sometimes we do chit-chat when we meet nice people, and we tell them they have a very nice display.”

Isn’t that sweet? But lawn sales are all about bargains, and where there are bargains to be had, there is a spirit of competition. Competition can mean ugliness, of course. We’ve all heard stories about the sweet old ladies throwing fists over that vintage Cabbage Patch doll, the $3 hair dryer or the Hillary Clinton Chia Pet.

Most lawn sales enthusiasts are perfectly nice people, my experts tell me. When they’re not nice, they usually only rise to the level of annoying. But there are those who employ true vulture techniques and make misery for everyone.

In a recent letter to the Sun Journal’s editorial page, an Auburn woman wrote this:

“Recently, my husband and I had a yard sale. I could not believe the unruly dealers, or ‘pickers’ who stormed into our garage, pulling out drawers and taking our personal things from items that were not for sale. It was a disaster. The saddest was when we went to look for my husband’s Korean War medals, they were gone. Never again will anyone invade my property. The general public was fine, it was the dealers and the pickers.”

A local man later wrote in response, insisting the bad experience was the result of a misunderstanding, apologizing for some of what transpired. Whether it was enough to inspire the original letter writer to try, try again remains to be seen.

No way! Five bucks?

Feeling more and more like I’m in over my head, Suze and I started hitting more sales.

On the low end of Montello Street, we’re barely out of the car before the lawn sale proprietor comes dashing over, thrumming with energy and flinging her sales pitches like confetti.

“Are you going to buy the coffee table? Twenty bucks for the set. Please tell me you’re going to buy the coffee table.”

Suze was interested in the coffee table, I was not. The lady didn’t give up on me, though. Before I staggered away, dazed and afraid, she tried her very hardest to sell me a pair of bright white golf shoes and a massive machine whose only function appeared to be the removal of corks from wine bottles. Excellent finds, both of them, if you wanted to get hammered on the back nine. I passed on both and somewhat fled for my life.

After helping Suze load the coffee table set into her Subaru, that is.

Further up Montello, there was a lawn sale spread out on a corner. This one was more to my liking. There was a woman there eating pizza and music was blasting from the side of the house. We stopped. We chatted. The woman identified herself as Elaine Dube, and she was standing amid an intriguing array of items. Tons and tons of record albums, for one thing, including the hard-to-pass-up “The Ronald McDonald All-Star Party,” featuring characters like Pepe Le Pew, The Chipmunks and the most horrifying Ronald McDonald you ever want to see.

Elaine holds lawn sales every now and then, she tells me, because it’s a good way to clear out basements, closets and back rooms. You know, so you have room for more stuff bought at somebody else’s lawn sale.

“I try to stay away from them, myself,” Elaine says. “I’m one of those people who will buy something just because it happens to be marked down to a dollar. Even though I don’t need it, I buy it.”

She laughs and offers us pizza. Most of the people that come by are nice, she says. Others are rather intense. No matter how low the price on a given item, those people want to see it go even lower.

“Oh, yeah,” Elaine says, “people like to dicker.”

Ah, dickering, an art form that is completely lost on me. Show me an item with $100 price tag, $100 is what I’ll pay. Which is stupid, because getting a great deal is the very point of lawn saling. And the more of it the better, right, Mrs. Weber?

“It can be a whole box of colored paperclips, retail $5.95, and I pay a quarter,” she says. (I call it bragging, but whatever.) “We got a Vermont Castings gas grill, used once, for $75. I have three grandchildren and can’t understand why anyone would buy anything in a store. I’ve bought Pack ‘n Plays, cribs, bureaus, kitchen sets, Barbie dolls, hundreds of Matchbox cars – on and on. I guess I must buy 20 or more books for my middle-schoolers every weekend. I guess I get most excited when I find a school bus I don’t have. I have about 350 different ones (my homeroom just counted them), and I never think I’ll find a new one, but I do. I’m not sure what all the other yard salers dream of, but I think it’s just happening upon the unexpected treasure that’s so much fun.”

Unlike some, Weber says she very frequently finds exactly what she’s looking for out there in the lawn sale jungle. Maybe it’s because she goes to so many of the things, or maybe it’s just plain luck. Whatever it is, I don’t have it. Although I saw a lot of interesting and occasionally disturbing things during our rounds, clearly I wasn’t going to find anything that I really, really . . .

But wait! What is this all bound up in plastic wrap, with a strip of cardboard marked with a price and other details? What is this enticing blue box of wonder?

For a few moments, I actually doubted what I was seeing. Clearly I had been in the hot sun far too long. Clearly, this couldn’t be a . . .

But it was. The find of the day for me – that thing my heart craved the most – was the Linksys wireless router, found on a cluttered table back at Elaine Dube’s lawn sale. The strip of cardboard said $15, but she let it go for $5 and I didn’t even have to dicker. Five bucks for an item I would have paid nearly $100 for if I hadn’t stumbled across it in a stranger’s yard. Five bucks and I’m spreading joy and wi-fi through the household.

Lawn sales? Count me in. Suze got a coffee table and I got technology. All that, just by circling a few blocks over a period of a couple hours. If I did this every weekend, all summer long, like Susan Weber and so many others do, I’d have to build a garage.

Bet your booty I’d buy the tools for it on somebody else’s front lawn.

Lawn Sale Queen Susan Weber’s pet peeves

Some advice for buyers and, for sellers, an idea of what you’re up against.

* “My biggest peeve is that people advertise that they’re open until 3:00 and they’re packing up at 2:00. When you ask them what the heck they think they’re doing, they say, ‘Oh it wasn’t busy, so we’re closing early.’ Like it doesn’t affect anyone! I’m thinking, ‘I’m here. Hello.’ Routes take time. People will be coming at 2:55. What is the matter with people?”

* “The dealers are out at 6:30 a.m. They either get all the valuable antiques and stuff to resell on Ebay, or they get driven off the property and cause the sellers to still be incensed by the time I get there. Mid-afternoon? All the good stuff’s gone unless you are looking for oddball stuff – I collect school buses.”

* “The really high-end neighborhoods are bad. They never shop at yard sales, so they think the sofa they paid $3,000 for 10 years ago should go for $1,500 at least. They’ll charge $2 or more for a book (don’t pay more than 50 cents). I know, I know – it’s $16.95 at the bookstore, but still . . . I got “The Pink Room” for a quarter. You never really know. Sometimes you find good stuff in an unexpected place.”

Playing by the rules

Here are some of Lewiston’s guidelines for garage sales:

* The fee for a garage sale permit is $10.

* There is a fine of up to $1,000 for not obtaining a proper permit.

* The garage sale cannot be longer than three consecutive days.

* No more than two permits are allowed per household in any one calendar year.

* No rain dates are allowed after the start of sale.

* One sign is allowed, not more than 4 square feet in size, on the premises where the sale is being held.

* The posting of signs on telephone poles, posts, trees and in the street right-of-way is prohibited.

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