There was a time, when I was young and the world was new,
when I could never manage to put the trash out on time. Sure, I managed to sort
the recycling and put the non-recyclables into the big green curbside bin
provided me by the city. The part I consistently failed at was the part where I
was supposed to drag that bin to the curb on the designated morning of the week
so that the trash man could come and collect its festering contents.
Fortunately, it was a big bin and it could hold like two months’ worth of my
trash, so this wasn’t as much of an issue as it might at first appear.
Then, there was another time, when I was not so young and
the world was getting on a bit, that I didn’t have curbside pickup because I
lived in an apartment building in France where I was expected to perform the herculean
task of carrying my trash down the hall and putting it in a bin in the rubbish
room. Circumstances at that time were such that I was regularly far too
overwhelmed to tackle that oppressive chore, so I lived with a pile of trash in
the kitchenette of my not-quite-200-square-foot (17 sq m) studio apartment.
“You’re going to get rats,” somebody almost certainly said
to me at some point.
“It’s okay, I have a cat,” I almost certainly replied.
But now that I’m old and the world is just falling apart, I
get up every Tuesday morning to put out my trash before the trash man comes at
9:00 a.m. to collect it. As far as Kitchen Trash Pile Me was concerned, 9:00
a.m. may as well have been the middle of the night, but she didn’t know how I
would swell with pride upon seeing that bag of trash fly into the back of the
garbage truck every week.
