“As dump day rolls in, I’m up to my ears in cardboard boxes, and using a grafting knife which is what’s in my pocket, I cut & slash, and flatten, enacting the trash ritual, something we all do, in our own unique ways. Who hasn’t wished for more dowsing ability, as decisions bear down around the refuse in our lives? What to keep, what to throw, what to shove deep into the bag, and hand over to strangers. Will they open their metal gates to relieve me of my burdens? In the anonymity of howling winds & snow devils, our hunched forms scramble up into truck beds, and down again to the ground, for the drag and drop. Hopefully no one will notice the illicit items snuck in under the guise of simple rubbish. The toxics, the shards of broken glass, the ten bagged clumps of poop, left in my recycling tub, by someone visiting. Yet in my heart of hearts, I know that I will not be judged at the dump. It is a place where the freedom to discard is sacrosanct. And for this, I am very thankful. It’s enough that I judge myself, my choices, my shame. On what may arguably be the coldest day of the year, my darkest collections will likely die, unnoticed, unremarked, sent off to the vacuous void of nameless fill. When all is said and done, and my dollars waved in the air towards one, then signaled to another, I enter the warming shed, a shack made for one purpose only. My eyes take a moment to adjust. The teenager slumped in a plastic chair seems almost to materialize out of nothing, as I realize he’s sleeping, catching a few winks, between customers. I hate to wake him, to see him doing what is nothing short of total indifference, yet as my errand is in need of quick dispensation, I stomp, and cough. He stirs, and noticing a body in his space, he sits up to do his job. The walls surrounding us define a cavern, possibly 8’ square, made comfortable, even cozy, by waves of glorious heat, emanating from a metal box wood stove, churning with fire.Nothing to see here, but for a girlie calendar, the likes of which I haven’t seen since car mechanics stopped hanging them routinely in their offices. Our eyes never meet, & he takes my money, which is next to nothing, for all the difficult things that are being taken off my hands. I can’t think of many other transactions in my life this raw, this primal. Just an ordinary part of rural life however, so my musings are moot. Everyone stays in their lane. But I still remember Lenny. Who used to run the dump, back in the 80s, a little into the 90s until he died. He was a friend, of sorts, and we’d talk and share some news, on dump day, when the dump was actually a pile of stuff, and not a transfer station. Back before anything was sorted, before you had to plan, or think much about your trash. You didn’t want to get in & out quickly, no, you wanted to savor the experience, and felt free to take a gander at what other’s were giving up, that you might want. Just because you didn’t want it, didn’t mean somebody else didn’t. Now, it’s a little unseemly, to pick at the piles. You appear a bit desperate, to prod things, or stand around, watching, what comes in, just out of curiosity. The higher value of stuff now, is an impediment to wanting it at this stage. It’s become a part of the waste stream. Not valued, because it didn’t go off to the thrift store, but ended up here. I’m not exactly sure why I pine for the dumps of yore. Why I miss Lenny, who seemed to own the dump, but who we all knew had a lot more going on besides shepherding plastic bags to their final resting place. These days, you’re apt to hit a traffic jam, if you don’t time it just right. The Priuses, the fancy SUVs, they jockey for position, each trying to get closer to the bins, in an effort to unload in an expedited fashion, to make way for another Prius, or SUV. It’s an Amazon subsidiary, this cardboard collecting industry, this frenetic post-shopping nightmare. And yes, I contribute my share, I do. I don’t know how not to. I don’t wrap my cheese in cloth, or take a day to go buy some audio component locally. I live in a world of sales reps, and Fed Ex. If I can, I will trudge out in the snow to meet a delivery person, and try to express my appreciation. But he’s in a hurry, and I’m in the middle of something, and we both know it. Maybe it was a good thing, that my last order with a big company was totally botched, from top to bottom. I actually texted the words to my rep: “If we get through this, we are going to be bonded for life”. I kind of meant it. I mean, why else would he have sent me all the wrong equipment? We clocked in about double, or triple the time, what it should have been, if our communication had gone smoothly. If he hadn’t been sleeping in his cubicle in Detroit, or on drugs, or distracted by bigger sales prospects. Guess I’ll never know. Tomorrow I’ll be taking all those extra boxes to the dump. If they feel like opening the dump. If they can rally, to do a job that maybe isn’t very gratifying for them the way it’s come down, been degraded, that makes them, somehow, feel less than. The way it could be, if we had less stuff, and slower lives, and the time to care about fewer customers, including the ones we actually might like, sans the endless distractions.”
