Wednesday

Wednesday is Garbage Day. I don’t have anything against Wednesdays. It just happens to be the day our trash is picked up every week. And our compost bin is emptied. And, every other Wednesday, our recycling bin. I grew up in a small town and our family was on a first name basis with the men who ran the route. One drove and one got out of the truck and emptied the cans manually. One of them always had a big stogie in his mouth and my mother figured it was to overpower the smell of the contents in the truck. One day my mother had a metal washtub she used to hold some extra trash and Eddie thought the tub itself was meant to be part of the pickup. He took it. My mother never quite forgave the injustice and talked about it for a long time. My husband likes to tell how, as a kid on his bike he followed the garbage truck around his city, in case someone threw away something that he thought might be “valuable”. When he and I were first married, we lived in a rural area outside another small town and were obliged to either make a regular run to the dump or burn our garbage in a designated trash barrel in the yard. I don’t know if that’s still legal, it hasn’t been allowed anyplace I’ve lived since then. Now I live in a major city and the trucks that come by our house have long arms to pick up the bins and dump them in the truck. There’s only person and they don’t get out of the vehicle. They sit high up, insulated from it all. Early this morning I happened to be standing in the living room window when the truck came past. The driver looked to the side and put his window down when he saw me. He grinned and gave me a big wave. I realized this guy high up in the driver’s seat was not really that much different than Eddie, the guy who rode with the truck and jumped out to empty cans when I was a kid. It felt like the old days.

Photo courtesy of Hans at Pixabay.com