My furniture is comfortable but old and sagging, mostly stuff my father bought long ago and some that I’ve salvaged from the world’s champion discount store, the Big D, a.k.a. the Edgartown dump, where every bargain comes with an absolute money-back guarantee. Edgartown is a summer home for a lot of very wealthy people who throw away housefuls of perfectly good stuff just because they may be tired of it or too busy or lazy or unimaginative to fix some simple malfunction in it. Other year-round islanders and I take the stuff home and use it. We are dump pickers because we like finding things and fixing them up and because some of us have thin wallets. Maybe if I win the Megabucks I’ll forego dump picking, but until then I won’t. After finally staggering back to bed and sleeping badly with the scent of Zee in my dreams, I was up again at three and back at Wasque Point at four to catch the last two hours of the tide as it fell away to the west. The fish were there, as were three other four-by-fours full of fishermen, and when we were not too busy reeling in bluefish to do so, we watched the red sun climb out of Nantucket Sound and bring another fair summer morning to the island.
