Several years ago, I bought some coffee filters, and after opening the pack, I realized they were the wrong size for my Mr. Coffee, too small. I held the ripped-open package of 100 coffee filters (now 99) and faced a quandary. Some people make this sort of mistake and move on; they just throw the package in the trash, write “coffee filters” on the shopping list again, and forget the whole incident. But that’s not the way I was raised, and it’s not the way I have continued. Therefore, I stuffed the unusable coffee filters into the cabinet because maybe someday I could use them for something. From time to time the coffee filters would fall from their hiding place, and I would cram them back in behind the cups and glasses, behind the coffee filters that actually fit. Sometimes my husband would try to use them for coffee, and I would tell him they were too small, don’t use those, and he would say, why do we have them, and I would say, just put them back where they were. To say they nagged at me would be overstating their power, but to say I forgot about them would be a fib.
Days, months, years passed. It was 2018, and we got some new-to-us furniture from my sisters-in-law who were moving. We had their wonderful furniture and our old furniture we no longer needed–a sofa, a desk, a coffee table, a chair. We tried leaving the items out on the curb with FREE signs but had no luck due to how fast everyone drives on our block, and also because the signs kept blowing into the street and getting run over. After a while we dragged everything back inside. Our new furniture was great, but our old furniture, though loved and still serviceable, took up an annoying amount of room, rather like a college kid back home for the summer.
I don’t remember where—probably from one of the blogs I like to read about how to save money by using cloth napkins and making soup—I heard of Buy Nothing groups on Facebook. These local groups encourage neighbors to give to other neighbors—clothes, furniture, Christmas trees—with no money changing hands. I joined my local Buy Nothing and started posting:
Hi, I have a coffee table available–21W, 42 L, 18H. Dark brown, almost black. It has scratches, but the top pops up for storage!
Sturdy desk! Comfy couch!
Nice chair, herringbone pattern. It swivels!
Goodbye, chair. Goodbye, desk. Goodbye, coffee table. We helped people load up their cars with our stuff, and later they posted pictures showing where they had placed the chair by the front window in their living room or how they had spruced up the desk with a coat of polyurethane. They thanked us. No, no, thank you!
No one wanted the couch, but I kept trying:
Floral couch. 7 feet long. Comfy! Not very heavy to move.
Nothing.
We were bummed about the sofa, but eventually it found a home in my son’s Brooklyn apartment. And, truthfully, we always kind of hated that sofa; the cushions slid around in a bad way. Comfy! Not really. Our son, at least, knew what he was getting.
After that first Buy Nothing success, I would browse other people’s posts but didn’t usually ask for anything being offered. I have plenty of stuff already. Once someone was giving away what was left from her yard sale. The house wasn’t far away, so I walked over, and when I got there, the yard sale host was just returning from a thrift store that had declined to take her donation. I ended up with two garbage bags of stuffed animals. A couple times a year, at the school where I worked as a librarian, I would hold a “book sale,” where I gave each student a book and sold gently used, donated toys and tchotchkes at ridiculous bargain prices. The Buy Nothing stuffed animals were a huge hit—so many unicorns!!!
Soon after this, mid-July, I was working in my yard, and I had yanked up a bunch of oregano from a bush that was spilling messily over onto the sidewalk. I was about to load it all into yard waste bags when I got an idea. I posted:
I just pulled up A LOT of oregano. Would anyone be interested in drying it? A year’s supply!
Yes, someone wanted it! She took it all, a paper grocery bag’s worth, then a few days later posted a picture of the resulting pile of dried oregano. My yard waste finding a home in someone else’s spice cabinet?! I was hooked.
Since that first summer, my Buy Nothing group got big enough to split into 3 separate groups, closed down for part of the pandemic, then reopened. At the end of the 2019-2020 school year, I had to move many boxes of assorted everything out of the school I worked at, and like many other people in lockdown, I cleaned out a few closets at home. Here’s some of what I gave away:
Old golf balls, a Princess Diana young adult biography, alphabet stampers, a James Bond book, a drying rack, a bowling ball, games, “one very furry cat puppet, one felt horse puppet, one slightly dingy rabbit-in-magician-hat puppet,” pillows, a Star-Bellied Sneetch, a Barbie laptop (!), two fancy embroidery kits depicting Blue Willow plates, a bag o’ plastic sheriff badges, a preschool apron, fancy craft paper made to look like old maps and newspapers, Elephant and Piggie stickers, a very scary Stephen King pop-up book, a Miss Spider’s Tea Party doll, scented bookmarks—vanilla ice cream, gummie worms, popcorn, strawberry, and lemon—possibly to be used as stocking stuffers, a beginner canning kit, a “like new” copy of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, grapefruit spoons, iced tea spoons, 2 tiny forks, an old, dusty, hard-sided suitcase, crystal pieces from a light fixture that I found on the sidewalk on trash day, two swimsuits—”new with tags,” plastic newspaper bags for dog poop, antler-themed Christmas stocking holders, one in need of gluing, a HUGE valentine card with a picture of a teddy bear on it, multiple bunches of fresh sage offered on a day when the news of the world was so terrible that it seemed like sage might be helpful.
This is what I got:
A Yamaha Electone organ with bench and manual, a mandoline for cutting vegetables and maybe one day my fingers, a grow light for starting seeds, a pile of Cook’s Illustrated magazines, one of which contained a recipe for the most scrumptious butternut squash soup, a DVD of The Princess Bride, two books about Pittsburgh in the olden days, a huge, awesome floor lamp that looks like what would have lit the room when Frankenstein was born. Once a teacher who got out of the biz invited other teachers come into her basement and browse through many, many bins of books she had collected for her classroom and take all we wanted. Yay!
(Remember when Robinson Crusoe goes out to the wrecked ship and salvages all he can and inventories everything he got—nails, clothes, tools, a dog, two cats, flour, sugar, rum—and it’s the best part of the book? Remember in Little House on the Prairie when Laura and Mary describe their Christmas presents—a peppermint stick, a heart-shaped sugar cake, a tin cup, and a shiny penny—and it’s awesome to read that list? Yep.)
Getting the organ was a production, as it was very, very heavy and had to come down stairs and then go up stairs. It was for my musician son, the one who lives in Brooklyn, and it seemed to be exactly what he had always dreamed of. We rented a truck, begged help from my son’s friend, heaved it into our dining room, read the manual, and learned after a time that it really wasn’t right for my son after all. He broke the news gently, but he didn’t want it. During the time we had the organ and were wondering what to do with it, a woman on Buy Nothing asked if anyone had a piano her visiting grandson could practice on. I’m not sure what got into me, but I invited them over; the kid played the piano a little, and really liked the organ, but not enough for the grandma to want it in her own house. When my family came home and saw a strange kid and grandma in the living room, they gave me strange looks. This was before the pandemic, and while obviously I’m not welcoming strangers into my home during the pandemic, I plan on inviting EVERY grandma and EVERY kid over EVERY day, just as soon as I can.
Despite the fact that the organ was a failure, I felt very proud of myself for solving so many problems to get it and solving a like number of problems to get rid of it. Eventually, a musical family we know took it. They were on vacation when the organ was first posted on Buy Nothing, and I came to believe that I was meant to get it and hold onto it for them until they were ready to receive it. I am not religious, but they are, and I accept that there are mysteries beyond my understanding, and that maybe I am an angel, sporadically.
The group shut down for a while during the pandemic, back when we were washing our groceries and shopping maskless. When we did open again, it was with a great excitement and much kindness. People offered extra food they don’t need, and sometimes food they had cooked for the very purpose of giving it away. Recently a woman with a cookie decorating business offered some rather realistic-looking penis and vagina cookies in honor of Valentine’s Day. They were wildly popular, but I did not request them. You pick and you choose.
Buy Nothing is supposed to be about building communities, not just about moving stuff around. People send “thank you’s” sometimes, publicly or in private messages, and that’s a nice and heartwarming part of the process. When I got the mandoline slicer, I realized the woman gifting it was someone I used to chat with years ago as I walked to my old job and she got herself and her son loaded into their car for work and school. The woman who took one of the swimsuits was a former student of my husband’s, and later she dropped off a copy of The Address, by Fiona Davis, that I had requested. The canning kit went to my community garden neighbor, and the seed starting grow light came to me from her.
People declare their interest in the items being offered, sometimes giving detailed reasons why they want whatever it is, but the giver can pick whomever they wish. If an item is very popular (the Barbie laptop!), I pick randomly. I usually say upfront that I’ll pick randomly, so I don’t have to get stressed over deciding who wants or needs it most. I can’t handle passionate appeals! Sometimes (my husband laughs that I do this) I write all the names on pieces of paper and close my eyes and pick, and sometimes I just pretend to pick randomly, such as when I offered the James Bond book and gave it, obviously, to someone with the last name “Bond”. He did promise me a hybrid car/submarine in trade, so it made a lot of sense to pick him. (Disclaimer: trading not allowed in Buy Nothing. We did not trade.) Once, in the comment section of a post, I tried to introduce two friends who lived across the street from one another to each other, but both are a little shy, and one was moving soon, so nothing came of it. Sometimes people ask directly for specific items they need—crutches, boxes, overripe bananas for banana bread, size 9 wide shoes to accommodate a painful bunion. Often their prayers are answered.
Some people offer to drop things off if needed, but I don’t do that, even though I can imagine a mother with three kids and no car trying to figure out how to pick something up. In some locations, Buy Nothing could possibly be hard for people of color to participate in because of concerns about getting profiled, hassled, or shot for walking up to someone’s porch or into someone’s apartment building and taking a bag or box. Once I got a box of assorted fabric, and when I, a 57-year-old white woman, went to pick it up around the corner, a kid standing further down the block gave me the fiercest look with arms sternly crossed because he thought I was stealing someone’s Amazon delivery. I wasn’t! Mind your own beeswax, kid.
I did make one delivery. The time I was giving away the canning kit, I was out for a walk and bumped into my community garden neighbor as she was heading to my house to pick up. I realized I had forgotten to set it out as promised, so I offered to drop off for her. When I got to her apartment, I was a little iffy on which door was hers then saw a million flower pots on the porch and knew I was in the right place.
Sometimes, Buy Nothing is not so great, like when people say they will pick something up, and they don’t come, and days pass and your offering gets battered by wind and rain. Should you try to track the person down, advertise again, or give up? Sometimes you just want those Altoid tins out of your house! Sometimes you post hopefully, yet no one wants the beige purse or the ping pong erasers. Why not?! They’re cute!
Mostly, though, Buy Nothing is good and sometimes it’s even great, like when you’re scrolling through the posts and you read this:
If anyone has white coffee filters lying around, I will gladly take them off your hands for a butterfly craft! Needed for next Saturday. Thanks!
Pardon me, did you say “coffee filters”?
Fingers trembling, you type:
Hi, I have a stack of maybe 100 of the 4-cup size. Too small for my coffee maker.
And you read:
That would be PERFECT. Exactly the size I need. Will PM you.
Eileen FitzGerald’s collection of short stories, You’re So Beautiful, a New York Times notable book of the year, was published by St. Martin’s Press. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, One Story, and other literary magazines. She lives in Salem, Massachusetts, and will have some sage and oregano to give away come summer.
