About Freecycling and Dumps

Freecycling, to my mind, is one of the great inventions of the internet world. Want something, but don’t have money for it? Put a notice on Freecycle. If somebody else in the group has it, they’ll let you know and you can come pick it up. Have something you don’t use any more, but it’s too good to throw away? Put a notice on Freecycle. Somebody will say they need it and come pick it up. Couldn’t be simpler. Just recently I got the file cabinets I’ve been wanting – lowest price I could find them for was over $100. Found a cart the coffee house people can use to roll their treats out into the lobby at intermission to show off and get customers-it’s a microwave cart but they don’t care, one wheel sticks but our handy guys can fix that - probably would have been around $50. And I just found a home for a nice hanging wine glass rack, the kind you put stem ware in over the bar. The former son-in-law got that, I have no idea why because we never had a bar or that much stemware, but it hung above the microwave for a long time, I took it down and stuck it in the closet and just found it when I moved things in that a couple of weeks ago, and thought someone might want it and I was right. She’s happy, I’m happy and one more thing is recycled.
Dumps – what brought that to mind was when the person came to pick up the rack I went out and said ‘Hi’, noticed a branch hanging in one of the trees and went to pull it down, picked up a few others on the way to the edge of the woods where I throw such things, and while I was tossing them onto the pile, I noticed – again – the several old things that are tossed over into the trees there. Toys, a tire, I forget what-all else. Made me think about dumps. When I was a kid there was one way at the far end of the old orchard, near a little marshy area that sometimes had a tiny pond in it, if there had been an overabundance of rain. Why the people put it there, well, I guess it was far enough from the house to keep critters away. I remember rummaging through it looking for treasures but I don’t remember if I ever found any. My mother dug through it after she started her antique shop and found some old bottles and other odds and ends, but usually in the days when the dump was in use if something went to it, it was past any use. Except for the bottles, some of those were interesting. And you could speculate on the broken things, what they were for and what happened to them.
I wonder what people in the future will think when they see our little pile? An old plastic push toy, I think a shopping cart, of Stephen’s, some beer bottles, couple of kitty litter pails that I don’t want to know what might be in them. And yes, I presume that somebody will go through it, probably the kids in the trailer park already have, because something about other people’s trash invites you to see if there’s any treasure in it.
Now the word dump means a huge garbage complex, plastic bags full of icky stuff, bulldozers smushing it down and spreading it out, but in years past they were a commentary on the lives of those who were there before. Mini archeological digs, as it were. That’s how we are learning about past civilizations. In the future, they will determine that ours is plastic. Hmm-not so far off, that.