Litter Lady keeps it clean
83-year-old picks up neighborhood trash
Litter is one of life’s unpleasant certainties, blowing around out there with death and taxes.
Kay Wilke doesn’t like it. Not one bit.
“I don’t understand people taking the last cigarette and throwing the pack on the ground. Or eating the last potato chip and tossing the bag,” she tells me.
When trash happens in her corner of the world, she makes it go away. She refuses to look the other way or assume someone else will clean it up eventually.
For an hour every day, Kay walks her St. Francis neighborhood with two plastic bags in her hands, one for garbage and one for recyclables. That’s right. She even separates.
She has been doing this more than 15 years. On Wednesday, I joined her. We have barely started when she spots a dewy tissue on the sidewalk’s edge. Into her sack it goes.
“Nothing is too small. I pick up gum wrappers,” she says as we resume walking.
Kay is 83 years old. She walks at a brisk pace and bends easily to banish the rubbish. She is well aware that waking up without aches or pains at her age is a blessing you don’t take for granted.
She and her late husband, Bob, raised eight children in the house where she still lives. Bob worked at American Motors and side jobs to pay the bills. Kay was a nursing assistant for 22 years. Long retired, she enjoys 16 grandkids and seven great-grandchildren.
She waits for traffic to pass before stepping out into S. Lake Drive to retrieve a Mountain Dew can, turning it over to dump out a disgusting slurry of soda and cigarettes ashes. She is not wearing protective gloves and doesn’t let germs affect her mission.
“I have hand sanitizer in my pocket, and I wash my hands thoroughly when I get home,” she tells me.
Pretty soon I’m picking up trash, too. “Good spotting,” she encourages me. “Maybe this is your calling.”
We walk up and down Armour Ave., Hately Ave., Lunham Ave., Denton Ave., Waterford Place, to name the streets I remember. It’s sunny and chilly. Kay is wearing a red fleece jacket, blue jeans and running shoes. The wind chill has to be dangerous for her to take a day off. She straps grippers to her shoes when it’s slippery.
We find fast-food wrappers, bottles, cups, paper, pens, cigarette butts, cigarette packages and other discarded stuff along the way. If you’re looking for litter, it’s amazing how much you see — even in a neighborhood Kay has been patrolling for so long.
Along the way, Kay empties her bags into trash cans or recycling containers. She knows where they all are.
A police officer once questioned what she was doing outside St. Francis High School in this neighborhood. But people on her route sometimes thank her. One day she found a $5 bill on the ground next to some litter. She wondered if someone was rewarding her.
“I’m the crazy old lady who walks the neighborhood. I was going to call myself Trash Lady, but I thought Litter Lady sounds better. It’s more elegant,” she laughs.
Kay didn’t ask me to write this. Someone else told me about her. But she would love it if you feel inspired now to walk your own neighborhood, bags in hand.
This is something she can do, she tells me, to make the world a little better.