trash

This morning I pulled out of the garage and turned up the street. I noticed a woman in an SUV pulling big bags of trash out of the back and trying to cram them into my neighbor’s trash can. In that split second, I waived cautiously and she smiled guiltily.

I was only a second or two down the road when the whole scene registered. Too late I realized that she was doing something she probably wasn’t supposed to and my little wave probably encouraged her! So, with righteous indignation churning through my veins, I pulled around the block and circled around to my own house again – knowing what I would see.

She had now precariously perched two HUGE bags of trash on top of my trash can. I rolled down the window. “Uh. Oh. Good. I was trying to catch you. I needed to put my trash somewhere. You don’t mind, right,” says she.

“Only insofar as it is about to rain and now my trash can is going to fill with water – then give off that distinct wet trash odor for the next few weeks,” says me.

“Oh, well. I ran out of room in my can and the trash man told me to just do this. He is just around the corner, so it should get too wet,” says she.

Not for nothing, but I am quite good at timing my trash output to coincide with collection. In my neighborhood, they only come once a week and you must get it all in the city assigned can. Mine was perfectly full. Then she came along and overflowed me. What would the neighbors think? “Boy, that Ryan doesn’t know how to manage his trash output. Shameful. Let’s shun him from the next Neighbor’s night out.”

I would have loved to ask this trash bandit why, if what she was doing was at the behest of the trash man, didn’t she do it in her next-door neighbor’s can? Why drive all the way to another block at 8 am with all that refuse stacked in her car? And, if the trash man was standing right there giving instruction, couldn’t she have just thrown it in the truck right then?

Jesus probably would have opened his trunk and offered to take it to the dump for her.