Free!

It must be spring cleaning time, because Folkstone Drive has become a bazaar. Within the last few weeks, you could have scored a kitchen cabinet, bathroom vanity and a grill — all sitting on the street, absolutely free!

It's hard to drive by this stuff without picking it up. It's that hunting-gathering impulse honed when I lived in New York in my 20s and practically furnished an apartment with pieces drug in off the sidewalk.

But with much internal dialogue ("do you really need a broken grill? don't you already have one sitting on the deck?") and a modicum of self-shaming, I've managed to ignore this free stuff and act like I'm above it all.

I concentrate instead on the backdrops into which these items are placed and what lies just beyond them — the woods, the flowers, the dogwood, the redbud! What's always free is the stride and the vista and what I see along the way. Everything else is just gravy.