The third Tuesday of every month is Heavy Trash Day in my neighborhood. Everything from large tree limbs to soiled couches line our street on Monday nights, which - in addition to increasing the resale value of every home in the area - also brings out the hordes of salvage-minded citizens looking for some free stuff. Early evening finds dozens of cars cruising slowly up and down the road looking for fine antiquities. Or a relatively non-stained futon, whatever.
I'm not really bothered by any of this. Trash picking has a long and storied tradition in our culture, and far be it from me to criticize anyone for looking to profit from my castoffs (especially when I still have a few items in my own home acquired in identical fashion). My biggest complaint is that the scavengers often act in such haste they leave crap scattered across our lawns. Right now my neighbor's front yard looks like somebody upended a dumpster on it.
We fared slightly better this time around. I don't usually have a lot to contribute to the occasion, but these days you'd have trouble cramming another bicycle into my garage, much less an actual automobile. This is partly our fault - what with being feckless 21st century consumers and all - but the previous homeowners also saw fit to stash a bunch of shit they apparently were disinclined to move to their new digs up in the rafters. In addition to a battered vacuum cleaner, I moved a bunch of spare cabinet parts and an old Ozarka water dispenser that may or may not still work. Maybe that makes me wasteful, but I know how many petrified rodent droppings I've found in there (I regularly lay out poison and sometimes "accidentally" leave the garage door open so the neighborhood felines can do some housecleaning), and damned if I'm going to drink water slightly more noisome than that coming out of Houston's pipes. At least the folks who liberated them were kind enough to arrange the remaining crap in a relatively tidy pile.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to see if my neighbor's computer monitor has been snatched up yet.
EDIT: It hasn't.
Our heavy trash day is the last Tuesday of the month. We have our regular herd of pickers. More power to them.
But the strange thing is our grass clippings. Our yard guy, The Magnificent Braulio, comes every other Thursday and leaves the grass clipping bags on the curb. By midnight… someone has taken them. This has been going on for six years. Who the hell wants our grass clippings twice a week? What do they DO with all that old St. Augustine? Do they realize we don’t clean up after the Black Dog in the back yard? Wouldn’t they have figured that out the first time they stole our grass, opened the bag, and it smelled like dog ass? Life amazes me.
Carol—
It’s probably composters. And if they’re using it for flower beds, no harm and no foul. Wouldn’t necessarily want to eat those veggies, though.
We have that on the first Thursday of the month. I rarely have any large trash, but I did once lay a bet with the across-the-street neighbor as to how long his extremely soiled mattress (that he claimed he’d been letting dogs sleep on, in the basement) would sit on the sidewalk. We both figured “after dark,”
As soon as we agreed on this point, a man pulled up (much before after dark), regarded the mattress with the excitement of a man who doesn’t want to give away just how excited he is, and asked if he could have it.
It actually runs cold chills, although it did hatch a super-villain like plot in my mind about how to rid the city of Athens, Tennessee of all its dirty poor people, somehow involving mattresses filled with time-release nerve gas, not unlike “Smilex” from Tim Burton’s first Batman movie.