The Things the Summer People Left Behind
a tribute to the dump
My new novel comes out in just six days! Don’t forget to enter the giveaway to win a cute beach tote, hat, and coffee mug. More details below!
As a vacation island, Martha’s Vineyard has always had a different rhythm from the mainland, set by the summer people, or “The Richies,” as my mother used to call them. For my mother, the tide of people that arrived on the island come June was a mixed bag—they brought bad traffic and crowded restaurants, but also a sense of renewal and excitement she had felt since she was a child growing up there, and a boost to the island’s economy. One of the great bonuses of the summer people in the 1930s and ’40s, was that they left around Labor Day and oh, what they left behind.
In those days, you couldn’t bring your car onto the steamship, so at the end of the season, it was easier for the summer people to have their maids drop their season’s-end cast offs and closet cleanouts at the dump. A short walk down a dirt road around the corner from my mother’s house, the West Tisbury dump looked like a typical refuse center in the old days, a flat clearing in the woods with a crater of dirt off to one side and a pile of black ash in the center, like the aftermath of an oversized bonfire. Rusting iceboxes and stoves stood along one end of the crater and people would leave their refuse in the center, for the town workers to burn. Outside the crater’s edge, folks would leave furniture and pile cardboard cartons, hatboxes and grocery bags brimming with discarded items.
This was my mother’s favorite place to look for treasure. There were rules at the dump, she explained, including the unofficial “give-a-little take-a-little rule,” which stated that for every item you took, you brought one to leave behind. One of her best friends, Shirley Kennedy, had her first date at the dump, shooting rats. She didn’t end up marrying the guy, which is probably for the best, but it sounded like the dump was quite the social place.
For some reason, Tuesday was my mother’s favorite day to visit the dump, and she was always looking for kitchen supplies to bring home to her mother, a talented cook. Cast iron skillets and aprons still wearing their price tags. She marveled that one wealthy family would drop off their entire array of perfectly good pots and pans at summer’s end every year and start the next year with a new collection. And she found an orphaned Limoges teacup that my grandmother ended up using as her favorite to read tea leaves in.
My mother always had good luck with clothing. She found a whole trunk of dresses, skirts and stockings close to her size, which she thought might have been a trousseau, including a white silk blouse she wore into her thirties. My Aunt Mary found a gold tooth in the pocket of a sport coat and sold it for $75 and snagged a pair of penny loafers, complete with pennies, which she wore until the soles were worn through. They were always happy to see shoes in their size, since during the war footwear was impossible to get, and they would stuff newspaper in the toes of the large ones.
My mother also found her beloved tricycle at the dump, a rare butterfly collection and a Revolutionary War-era musket, but books were by far her favorite things to find.
Books were hard to come by during the war—paper, binding materials and ink were diverted to the war effort—so my mother read whatever titles were left behind: a wet Rebecca that had been rained on, which she dried the best she could, a Madame Bovary she hid from her mother, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which gave her nightmares (but she finished it anyway). After the war, once she could afford to choose her own titles, she prized and appreciated her books for the rest of her life.
Today, the West Tisbury dump has moved into the modern age of recycling and is famous for its thrift shed, now known as The Dumptique, heralded as far away as Paris. It is curated by volunteers and people come from all over to visit and it is loaded with clothing and household items just like the dump of yore.
I had to include the dump in my new book, The Martha’s Vineyard Beach & Book Club, and the two main characters, the Smith sisters, find a lot of their clothes there. Cadence, the older sister, gets called out, by a snobby rival, about her well-worn clothes she found at the dump. And Briar, sixteen, likes men’s clothes, so she watches the obituaries and visits the dump strategically. Two great, fellow dump strategists I bet my mother would love.
Have you entered my giveaway?
I’m choosing two lucky readers to receive a Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club tote bag, baseball hat, and coffee mug!
To enter, pre-order my new book from my local bookstore Hickory Stick Bookshop, from your own local bookstore, or from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop.org.
Then email your bookstore receipt and your mailing address to mvbookgiveaway@gmail.com
The deadline to enter is midnight EST on May 26, 2025.
This giveaway is open to US residents.
I will notify the two winners by email!
Read my personal essay in People magazine
Listen to my interview with Carrigan & Company
I had such a fun time talking to Kim Carrigan about my new book. You can listen on Apple podcasts or Spotify, or watch on YouTube.
Watch my interview with Books and the World
I had the pleasure of speaking to Roger A. Smith for his show Books and the World, hosted by the Cape Cod Writers Center. You can watch our conversation here (or below).
A Bookish Home
Laura, the creator of
, told me that she read Lilac Girls while she was in labor with her daughter, determined to finish before she left the hospital (OMG!). We had a great chat about my new book.Catch me on tour!
I’ve just added some additional tour stops in Ontario and California. All the registration links are on my website.
What a treasure trove! While the idea of so many people throwing things away after hardly using them at all is terrible, I love that they found a new and much longer life in someone else’s home. As someone who can’t walk past a secondhand or vintage shop without going inside, I think it would have been absolutely fascinating to search through the treasure left behind!
The Dumptique! Many of my characters get their clothes from there - along with a few of my (real) Vineyard friends!!!Congratulations in advance on your book launch :) Tracey (writing as T. Elizabeth Bell)