It’s one of the best feelings of the week. In our part of town, it usually happens Tuesday. I get up pretty early each day it happens. I make sure everything’s just so; sometimes I partly prepare things the night before. Then, about the middle of the morning, (since I’m on holidays this week, I’m actually around to see it happen) there’s that visit. There’s that telltale engine roar and sudden stop in front of my house. Sometimes it comes with a friendly wave.
“Have a nice day,” the guy in the Miller Waste truck says.
“You too,” I answer.
Then, for just those few seconds in the week, that feeling comes over me. All that stuff – that biodegradable goop that’s been getting higher and higher sitting around in my garage for seven days, that ever-growing daily collection of newspapers and unwanted paper flyers, and every bottle, can and piece of plastic I’ve been saving all week – simply goes. It disappears. The garbage collectors take it away and it’s gone out of my life. I am a man of simple pleasures. One of them is getting rid of my garbage – whether it’s just the biodegradable stuff every week or the bio and non-biodegradable every other week.
Of course, our greater understanding of environmental issues, over the last generation, has raised our awareness of this process like never before. When I was a kid, back in the 1950s and ’60s, nobody knew or cared about where the garbage went. Babyboomers and their parents were just encouraged to buy, use, throw away and buy again. The leftover mashed potatoes, the scrunched up Christmas wrapping paper, the discarded engine oil and a million other by-products of our consumption-mad generation, just became somebody else’s problem.
Since the world was our oyster, the rest of the world, including the oysters whose world we polluted with our garbage, would just have to deal with it. Thanks to rapidly filling landfill sites, government regulations trying to protect air, land and water, and even our children’s and grandchildren’s teachings, however, some of us have changed our consumptive ways.
Consequently, a good proportion of my week – sometimes large sections of my weekends collecting yard waste, occasionally early mornings bundling unwanted flyers before I head off to teach, or very often late at night tearing cardboard boxes apart, gently removing the wet trash from under the sink, or assembling our own glass and plastic (as well as the plastic bottles I’ve collected while walking the dog in the park all week) into a jam packed blue box – goes into that moment I haul it to the end of the driveway and watch the sanitary truck and crew take it away! Does this sound familiar?
Last weekend was typical. Now, a lot of you were off spending your well-deserved summer holidays at the cottage, away in the Rockies or out on Prince Edward Island. And that’s fine. But I spent much of my Sunday rooting around in the backyard garden. My wife and I had promised ourselves we would attack one of the flower beds back there – actually it’s a flower bed mostly occupied by weeds, scrub bushes and unwanted seedlings.
But I don’t just go willy-nilly into a weed patch slashing and burning. (Remember the smell of burning leaves in the fall? Can’t do that anymore.) Anyway, I organized all the weed refuse into waste I could bag, waste I could bundle and waste I could mulch. By the end of the process I had a whole smorgasbord of packages all ready for delivery to my curb.
“Do you think they’ll take those away?” my neighbour asked.
“Of course, they will,” I said. And I thought, “Who could reject these perfectly assembled packages of yard waste? I mean I’ve seen Christmas gifts wrapped worse than my weeds were bundled.”
Then, on Civic Holiday Monday, while many of you lounged au naturel at Bare Oaks, roasted marshmallows over a campfire in Algonquin, or maybe rode the rollercoaster at Canada’s Wonderland, I entertained myself in the garage – another zone of notorious neglect. There were winter tires to stack (yes, I know, it’ll soon be time to re-install them), hoses and extension cords to untangle, and two or three tool boxes to consolidate (Ever wonder how many Robertson screwdrivers a household actually needs?) And finally, when it sort of looked as if I had accomplished something, I swept up what was left… for the garbage.
And then the final act of sending if off… forever. Whether it’s ridding my garage of green box smell (and successfully having kept it from marauding racoons), waving goodbye to last week’s news (the Cosmos excepted) and bargain flyers, or knowing those weeds from the flower bed are gone (at least until next spring) throwing stuff away can be really liberating.
Like I said – a man of simple tastes enjoying garbage goin’ down the road.
