My Life in Salvage

In 2008, I signed up as a volunteer at the new 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. On and off, I have been working on a book about this – and I started a blog that chronicled of some of the stuff that has come in, and gone, over the years. The blog has been suspended but the Gift House goes on . . .

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