The Columnist Manifesto

Our Town has a thriving culture of what it calls "trash picking." This sounds like, but decidedly is not, rooting through garbage cans, which would be sad and yucky, but rather a social contract in which potentially reusable items are put out on the curb with the trash in an implicit offer to the public: "help yourself" to anything you may find useful. Almost invariably, any such item gets snapped up hours before the trash pickup crew arrives the next morning.

Some of my friends make a hobby out of trash picking. They will dine out for years on stories of how they trash-picked a picnic table, a perfectly decent bike, a pair of great old cross country skis.

Moral Turpitude is furnishing her new solo practice law office these days. Clearly, she is doing what she can to keep her overhead down, but I would really like to steer her away from picking up this sort of thing.