Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Report from Uppastump, Maine

Sippican Cottage on "How The Festival of Trash Saved My Bacon." An excerpt:

Very little is ultimately left for the trash man, because everyone turns the occasion into a gigantic swap meet. It's considered very bad form to try to sell anything during the Festival of Trash. A few people have yard sales to coincide with the event, but they get snickered at. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk-stained couch for free? A kind of general reckoning happens. Like water finding its own level, vaguely useful things find vague uses in the eye of the beholder, and they get swapped without deals being struck. If you see it, you take it. Things that are no longer useful to one household get picked up by other households and put to use. I think it's grand.

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