Garbage in, garbage out — over and over again
We’re moving into a smaller house.
We don’t need these extra bedrooms. No one but the cat has slept in the spare rooms for years, yet they have to be aired out, vacuumed and cleaned. We have closets full of clothes we never wear, cupboards full of dishes we never use and a dining room we haven’t eaten in since Clinton was president.
The attic is a complete unknown. If it was on a map, it would be labeled “Here be dragons.” No one knows what’s in the attic, except for whatever is rustling around up there at night. Could be a raccoon, could be a family of four. I don’t want to know.
When we eat with friends, it’s either at the kitchen table or at a restaurant. Let someone else clear the table and wash up afterwards. We use the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen and the porch — the rest of the house is abandoned. Half the stuff in the garage has never been used, and the other half should be returned to its rightful owners. I’ve been meaning to get around to it — for 40 years. I think some of them have passed on already. We could probably sneak most of this stuff into our neighbors’ garages. They’d never notice, since they are as bad about hoarding stuff as we are.
So, we’re packing up to move to a right-sized home. What we couldn’t sell at garage sales or online, we gave away to our friends and neighbors. Anyone that visited us had to walk out the door with something. A jar of mayonnaise. A can of garbanzo beans. A lamp, a side table, a box spring. It didn’t matter if they wanted it or not, we made them take something. They could slough it off on someone on their way home if they wanted, as long as it was out of our house. But that was the easy part. The hard part has been getting rid of the stuff under the sinks. Why do we have half a jar of silver polish? How old is that? I’m not sure we ever owned any silver. Surely not enough to use half a jar of polish. Is it garbage now? Is it safe to throw it away? Half-full jars of cleaning products, floor wax, oven cleaner ... how do we get rid of it? That’s something we never used to ask when I was a kid. Rat poison? Throw it in the garbage. Drain cleaner? Whatever. Nuclear waste? Flush it down the toilet. As a city boy, I never asked myself where the drain went. Stuff just magically disappeared. Now, after years of living on a farm with a septic system, I know exactly where it goes. There is no magic involved; it stays pretty close to where you put it.
We have city friends who visit us, and when they find a spider in the bedroom, they’ll kill it with a wad of Kleenex and flush it down the toilet three times to make sure it’s gone. The next morning, we get to hear all about the new organic store where they now do all their shopping, how they separate their garbage into neat little stacks of newspapers and tin cans, how they bring their own shopping bags with them to the store. Does that organic food get delivered on organic trucks? Is the store where they shop made out of organic steel and organic sheet rock? Is it organically air-conditioned? Are the shopping carts compostable? Is the garbage truck that takes away their separated garbage made out of organic steel? Does it run on used pasta? I don’t see how bringing your own shopping bag makes up for all that. What a waste.
Contact Jim Mullen at mullen.jim@gmail.com.