I derive a preternatural pleasure from taking out the trash. In any new home – and there have been a preternatural number of them in recent years – I inquire immediately about trash/recycling schedules, write them down, commit them to memory…
There is something extremely satisfying about the ability to simply put things I no longer want or need into a bag, seal them so the odor no longer emanates, and leave them outside, and have them magically disappear by the time I wake up the next morning. Would that it were so easy to eliminate detritus, aches, and other superfluities of the body, heart, and mind that facilely. I don’t have to haul them to the dump, bury or burn them in my nonexistent backyard, or wonder where they go. I ought to concern myself more about that last issue, but that’s another essay.
I enjoy the lightening effect of letting things go – of making space – even if it is garbage. I like not having to look at it; so much so that I have another (perhaps equally as odd) predilection to pre-bag trash even before it reaches the kitchen bin. To avoid malodor, I put the small daily collection (teabags, Truvia packets, peach pits) in the blue bag in which I receive the neatly folded New York Times and tie it up in the evening where it then goes to rest in the squat plastic receptacle under the sink. It’s not OCD so much as ant-avoidance that makes me do this.
I’ve felt this way for a long time. I remember my mother leaving the heavy door ajar while she walked the daily trash down the hall to the incinerator in our Howard Beach, Queens apartment where I spent my early youth. I puffed up with pride when she finally deemed me old enough to make the trek – walking down that dimly-lit corridor to the even heavier steel door beyond which lay the heaviest door of all, on the chute down which the waste descended to its demise. The walk reminded me of the lone pilgrimage down my Grandparent’s hallway each Passover to admit Elijah. Who knew what might emanate from that sooty shaft besides ashy, hot air? I wonder if buildings even burn their own trash any longer.
Many years later I lived briefly in another apartment complex with long halls – these straight from the set of The Shining. I walked at a brisk clip with my trash, unimpeded by collection schedules, to a similar slide that led not to an incinerator but to a big dumpster. I always half expected the twin girls in their bow tied baby blue dresses to greet me at either end whispering “redrum!” But the tingly, irrational fear was a small price to pay for the ability to toss the litter whenever the mood struck, rather than on a designated day.
In England, the whole waste management process, at least for my little flat in Old Town Stratford Upon Avon, baffled me initially as had many of the just different enough customs in my adopted and adored home. The leasing agents were of little help when I inquired about the procedure: “Well, we really don’t know. There are bins in the storage area, and you have one designated for your flat, but we don’t know when it’s collected.” So, for several weeks I went into that dark, dank, cobweb-covered brick room and just left my bags in my bin, thinking the trash collectors would eventually come and fetch them. Not until I met my only across-the-hall neighbor, did I realize that no one would take the trash out for me, and that the residents in the building simply used those bins to store trash until pick up day so it would not pile up in their flats. But we could not wheel said bins out to the street like I’d done in my home of twenty years in Connecticut. We had to return to the scene of the grime, remove the full black bags, and cart them to the corner where we simply dropped them on the pavement for the collectors. Every two weeks (hence the need for some to store trash elsewhere for the fortnight). The recycling went out on the alternate week. In black bags. On the corner. I could never understand this process, as often varmints would tear into the bags and feast before the garbage trucks got to the pile. But as a guest Yankee, I didn’t like to make waves, so I just got a tall chrome kitchen can and generated minimal waste so that the biweekly schedule suited me quite well.
Back stateside, and back to a weekly (Tuesday trash, Friday recycling) routine, feels much more satisfying. Living alone, I still don’t accumulate that much debris – I feel for my neighbors with small children who regularly overflow their allotted rolling olive green garbage pail. I probably ought to attend to my mental and emotional dross with the thought, care, and joy that I reserve for my physical refuse. That, like everything, is another essay.
Great ponderings, Diane...very satisfying subject!!!