Here is the pile of cardboard and mixed paperboard that is piling up on my back porch. You can learn alot about me from this pile of rubbish:
- I (or someone I hang with) likes to experiment with Midwestern microbrews.
- I shop on Amazon.
- I accept shipments through the U.S. Postal Service.
- I recently reorganized my filing “system” (blue=papers with $$$ signs; red=Keep Until Dusty; yellow=anything with the letter “q”)
- At some point in my life, I drank a half of a case of King Estate Pinot Noir and I was so happy about it, I kept the box.
- Our Christmas lights this year were LED from Home Depot… Sigh. Local-Eco vs. the Box Store, round 2 million.
- Somewhere in my house an undeserving amaryllis is dying a slow death by my black hand.
But that’s the tangential detail. It’s the pile itself from which you learn something more significant: our fair city, Stratford Connecticut, has curbside recycling which does not accept the simplest reusable material, cardboard, and its recycling minions have been seen pulling cereal boxes out of the junk mail/newspaper/magazine mixed paper bags and toss them back in our yard.
Bye-Bye Love. Bye-Bye Cardboard-ness
On our first recycling day after our move in here, we spent about an hour breaking down our move-in boxes and hauling them to the curb. We even put the garbage (one kitchen bag) on one side of the driveway and the recycling bin with the boxes on the other.
In the morning, I watched through the blinds as the belabored trash men tossed our post-consumer waste boxes (from Sterling Relocation in London– go team!) in the back of the truck with our kitchen garbage bag.
I’ll tell you something: it felt like they had tossed ME in the back of the truck, I was so crushed. After the truck pulled away, I looked at our measly blue bin, which was mostly empty. A few cans (we eat mostly fresh and drink hardly any soda), one or two milk bottles and a paper bag of junk mail. Misery was my middle name.
Later that week, I chatted with Todd, our young neighbor. “Yeah, you gotta take the cardboard down to the Transfer Station in Lordship. I don’t bother, frankly.” He chuckled. I chuckled too. Exactly. Why bother?
My Funny Ambivalence
So, for the last six months, I haven’t bothered. I’ve been sickly tossing the boxes to the curb and then turning my back. In the early Monday morning, before I climb from bed, I listen to the truck come and go and know it’s hauling to the dump perfectly reusable material. And no one cares.
Sigh. How good a person can I be, I have to ask the mirror — or the cardboard– today. Let’s face it: eating organically, shopping thoughtfully, living genuinely, they all take effort. More effort than they should, don’t we know it? Especially when we choose to live in a community committed to old habits and half-assed change.
So, look into the pile. I am not a slob. But maybe I AM starting to understand those so-called rednecks who park their future-masterpiece vehicles in a slump on the lawn or the driveway. Sure the tufts of grass grow around their rusting wheel wells, but, it takes time to rebuild something. Meanwhile, you gotta hold onto things that have value, even if, at the moment, they look like trash.
