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GREENSBORO - If there is one hard and fast rule about yard sales, it is this: Someone always - always - shows up early.

It doesn't matter how many exclamation points you put after your stern request on Craigslist for "No Early Birds Please!!!!!"

Because when it's summer, and there's the chance of finding that magical bargain, or at least a set of gently used Jeff Gordon barstools, the allure of the yard sale is impossible to resist.

On a recent Saturday on Beckford Drive, people began showing up before the crack of dawn, even as Anita Tester, daughter Suzann and her boyfriend Matt Holmen were still putting items out on the lawn.

They tried to turn them away - the sale wasn't supposed to start until 8 a.m. - but eventually they gave up.

"You just go ahead and let it go," Anita Tester says.

The sale was on.

There are two kinds of things you can find at a yard sale. First, there are the items that, taken together, illustrate the arc of the sellers' lives. Textbooks. Children's clothing, now outgrown. Golf clubs.

Then there's the other stuff.

Holmen and the Testers had both kinds.

In one box, "Economics Fourth Edition" and "A Practical Guide to the Unix System," selling for $3, fat and intimidating.

And spread along the grass nearby, the other stuff.

A telescoping marshmallow stick.

A little plastic figure of Shaggy holding Scooby Doo in his arms, apparently having just seen a ghost.

A Parker Brothers ouija board.

A powdered wig.

"You're going to have a range of things at a yard sale," Anita Tester says. "You're going to have pure junk that really isn't worth anything to anybody. But you're going to have some nice stuff, too."

There is always the chance that you might discover that ultra-rare "Superman #5" or the Dallas Cowboys recliner your wife made you give up 20 years ago or, who knows, a leg lamp.

You never know what you might find.

"That's the cool thing about yard sales," says Melvin Ferguson, heading back to his car with a package of diapers and a Spider-Man comforter.

After the early birds fly off, the tone of the sale changes.

Yard sales have their own rhythm, something like a garage band's first practice. They stop, they start.

Then, all of a sudden, no one's there.

And even when a car pulls up, it just cruises past, as if the lack of shoppers is evidence enough that all the really cool stuff is gone.

With luck, by the end of the day, most of it is.

It helps when people like Lisa Baker drop by.

A few minutes later, she's heading back to her car with a hamster cage and a trash bin.

Her little car is already full.

"I need to go home already - I haven't even been out for an hour," she says. "I have a shopping problem."

Contact Jason Hardin at 373-7021 or at jason.hardin@news-record.com