Three years ago, though, I signed up to work at the swap shop on the grounds of our town dump on Cape Cod. It is a salvage shack, basically. Everything is free there. This creates an unusual, almost wildly blissful environment — a browser’s utopia. It is also a town hang-out and listening post. 

Yes, it is located at the dump. And there are bad smells that sometimes go with that. But mostly, the Orleans Gift House is a spectacular, transformative place to spend a few hours. A chronicle of some of the stuff that has come in, and gone, can be seen on a blog that I created for the town, where locals can browse the highlights of the salvage without actually driving down there. 

The book that I’m working on, which sometimes I call, The Gift House, and other times I call, My Life in Salvage, describes in lurid detail what it is like to live year-round on the Outer Cape and what I’ve learned at the dump.  I should be finished writing by summer.