Book Arts Sale: The final chapter

It's been raining hard off and on for the past 18 hours....but amazingly the first drop didn't fall until after we had cleared out the tables from my sale and closed the garage door. That's just the kind of luck I had for the sale yesterday.
My friend's 14 yr. old daughter, Rowan, spent the previous night with me so we could get up bright and early to set up. We hadn't spent much time alone together before, but I was not surprised to find her kind, hard-working and very funny (like her parents). My sister-in-law joined us to handle the money box and my mother was there to keep things looking tidy, so they left me free to talk to people and say hello to friends.
Because of the craft focus of the sale, the people who showed up were like-minded artists and crafters ready to search out new treasures for their desk or studio. One mother bought a bag full of stamps, beads and paper for her teen-age daughter as a surprise and could hardly wait to get them home to her. A young art student found a number of things for altering books and a nice fat roll of paper. Another person had just discovered the fun of making her own cards and picked up various supplies for that...and then brought back her boyfriend who is a book artist to look through the paper portfolios (he brought his own paper tube!).
My friend Alison (a talented letterpress printer) brought her daughter Ava who kept one body part always firmly attached to her mother. In the end she did accept a muffin from us, and picked out a string of bright blue glass fish beads for herself.
And because this is a huge dog neighborhood, we had lots of visitors who came by while walking their four-legged friends. Rowan decided that Bella needed to get some attention as well so went and got her from the house. Though Bella looks big and fluffy, she's only 30 pounds and she has learned how to fold her long legs into Rowan's lap.
There wasn't a lot to clean up afterwards and we just moved it quickly into the garage for me to sort out later today. (Some will go to the non-profit kid's art organization, ArtStart.) Rowan and I sat down at the dining room table to start counting the money. The total? $748. We stared at each other in total shock. Virtually everything was under $5...could I have possibly sold that much? The evidence was, as they say, incontrovertible.
My goal had been to cover the cost of my flat file purchase and maybe buy a decent desk-top paper cutter for the studio. I'm not sure what I'll do with the rest. And as much fun as the sale was, it was a lot of work. So I'm going to try hard not to take the tempting cash from yesterday into any paper shops in the future....or this week at least.