Spring Clean-up And Garbage Picking

This week is our city’s spring clean-up where everyone can drag to the curb they stuff they’d normally need to drive to the dump themselves (and pay a fee to leave there). This means many of the neatly manicured lawns and superbly decorated yards have berm blight — large piles of unsightly garbage including old recliners, refrigerators (with doors off), broken entertainment centers, mattresses, rusted metal kitchen cabinets, and the like.

I had planned on taking some photos of these mounds of garbage, but it’s been raining (which makes those recliners and mattresses even more appealing, let me tell you), so I didn’t walk about as planned.

This rain, however, did not stop the garbage pickers. Like dumpster divers, garbage pickers are a die-hard lot; they don’t let a little rain stop them from their appointed rounds. Hey, this stuff’s only going be around ’til the garbage guys come, so they don’t have time to waste. (It’s like a twisted version of April showers and May flowers.)

And call me crazy, but garbage pickers have become a lot more organized in recent years.

It used to be your town had one or two known garbage pickers — usually older men with rusting trucks or station wagons with broken mufflers who slowly drove through the neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning your garbage was due to be collected. But these past few weeks, as our city prepared for the big garbage pickup days, I noticed many garbage pickers. Some in new mini-vans, some in tiny little sports cars, and one evening, on the way to one of our children’s school events, we spotted two ladies with a shopping cart!

Now that’s determination and preparation because you’re going to have to ‘borrow’ one of those, aren’t you.

Everyone in town’s been talking about how fast things are disapearing from their curbs. Even my regular cashier told me how “two boxes of junk, two ancient TVs, and one of those giant old satelite dishes” was taken from their lawn the very first night they were put out.

Maybe all this dedication to garbage picking is a sign that times are hard — no one wants to overlook the potential, the usefullness, in what others throw away. It is recycling after all.

It may not have been a “professional” or even a prepared garbage picker who snuck over unheard and unseen to rifle through your rubbish.

Perhaps it was not thought about but rather a spontaneous decision made by say, a family going for an ordinarily Sunday afternoon walk who just happened to see a great old solid wood door laying there on the curb and the parents just couldn’t pass up such a beauty…

Even if it meant they had to carry it home a few blocks.

You should have heard the kids! They were lecturing us about stealing property, worried we’d end up in jail, and Derek and I exchanged looks that said we’d better not tell them of our individual garbage picking abilities (I myself began when I was younger than they are). But the girls are onto their next point — wondering why we’d even bother with such an old beat-up door.

“Don’t we already have doors?”

“Yes, we have doors,” we say.

“What are you going to do with it?”

“We don’t know what we’ll do with it yet. But it’s a neat old door,” I say as my fingers are arguing with my back about who is the most sore.

“Why do you want it then?!”

“We can make something out of it,” I say, huffing a bit from the work involved in carrying it. “Like a table, or a headboard, or cut it up to make smaller doors for other furniture pieces Derek can make.” I’m getting really excited now.

The girls are staring at the door with disgust and disdain. It’s clear from their faces they see nothing but garbage here. Why would anyone pick this up? Carry it several blocks home? Let alone risk jail for it.

Derek says, “They don’t make solid wooden doors like this anymore, they’re all hollow now — unless you pay a fortune… This is really neat.”

“And heavy,” I grunt and say I need a break.

We set the door down and note what looks like water damage at the bottom, where the veneer is lifting. “We could just cut that off and still make something out of it. This side with the crackled aged paint is really neat,” I say. Derek nods in agreement. We pick it up again for the home stretch.

“So, what are you gonna do with it?”

We sigh. These kids have no imagination. “We don’t know yet; but when we do, we’ll tell you.”