Use It Up, Wear It Out

The garage is a universe of ungodly junque including a clear plastic tri-fold egg carton I should have recycled months ago and also a big dirty bag half full of potting soil, and so today, as the world closed down, I spooned soil into the plastic dimples, soaked it and planted 12 collard seeds, showing them the seed packet to encourage them. Closing the carton created a terrarium. It's now in a dark warm place. Possibly the seeds will germinate in five to seven to ten days, maybe. I realized I have utterly forgot how to garden, remembering only that the largest part is faith.

Next I wanted, or rather, needed, for the very first time to put up a house number, but didn't want Mylar numerals stuck on the siding or the constant sight of numerals disrupting my contemplation of nature. Everyone until now has found this house, but one dark night someone had to drive seven miles from here to catch enough phone signal to call me and wail that there was no house number, and I had to go stand on the highway with a lantern to guide them.

What might the solution be? In the garage, behind trashbags of packing peanuts, was a two-foot metal planter so old I had grown up with it, heavy and too corroded inside to plant in. Inverting it over a rock and applying the numerals created a sturdy yet portable and removable house number, a courtesy for the Instakart drivers and first responders one might need in a pandemic.

These frugal up-cyclings enhanced the refreshing and sparkling spring day, ideal for scrubbing the bird feeder and refilling the outdoor mousetraps with poison, admiring the perennial crocuses down by the road; a hawk careering in an uncluttered sky and red cardinals calling to hardly anybody.

The Dump in the Woods

I can't believe I've never written about the dump on the property, but in the woods maybe 200 yards from the dwellings, there it is, and the dumping was done years ago, maybe in the 1980s and early '90s,  and the ton of junk hasn't moved in the 12 years I've lived here except  in 2002 when Demetrius and I made 18 ambitious round trips dragging full and heavy garbage bags out of the woods, and quit after seeing we were not making even the least dent in the pile. The shallow ravine is loaded with jagged glass, rusted metal, plastic, a tire or two, and, to make it worse, 1) nothing old and cool, no artifacts or antiques, and 2) whoever dumped it cleverly left no clue as to his or her identity. Dumping is illegal but surprisingly common in rural areas, especially when weekly trash pickup service costs $90 every three months. I'm always shocked to find, say, abandoned refrigerators, tires, or even rusted-out cars in woods that appear otherwise pristine.

All this spring my neighbor's son Patrick has been sorting these materials, bringing them out of the woods, crushing the aluminum cans, loading them on a truck and hauling them to the recycling station, a heroic effort to unburden our woods of this ugly foreign material. But the dump has an upside, and I will discuss it in the next installment.

Too Tough and Ugly to Say "Welcome"

As I recall, only three recycled things existed before "recycling" as we know it came to be: returnable glass bottles, tire-tread sandals, and recycled-tire doormats. Look in Lowe's all you want but you won't find these weighty, classic mats too tough and ugly to say "Welcome" but able to take horrible four-season daily outdoor punishment, will clean gunky bootsoles, will not float away during floods -- they're too durable. My old one (left), bought at Dickey Bub's, $5, the last one in stock, haven't seen one there since, began to fall apart this winter after six or seven years; the metal pincers finally rusted through and released tire chunks which began to migrate into lawnmower territory.

Living in the sticks and gas prices being what they are I buy most things online now, but the problem finding this item was: What's it technically called? A tire-link doormat, an outdoor tire-link mat, a recycled-tire mat, a machine-shop mat. . .anyway, I found one made in Pennsylvania, USA, about twice the weight of the old one, with rug-like "pile" on top, $14.95 and $10 shipping. Always pleased to buy USA-made items.

Change, Adventure, and Surprise

I won't look farther than my own backyard for an epic task that will change my entire life. I need only to clean the garage. And then stuff my little car with junk and go to the recycling place.

Today, a rainy day, I got at it, wrestling with cardboard boxes, stacking the empty five-gallon buckets, bagging up a lot of plain trash, some inherited when I moved in 8 years ago: bags of concrete mix that absorbed moisture and solidified; avocado and yellow vinyl window shades. For the first time I noticed a ladder had actually been built into the garage wall so that junk laid across the ceiling beams could be retrieved, although it seems that the point of putting it up there was that it would stay there for all time.

So I staggered around with my two obsolete TVs and as much of the cardboard as would fit and drove in the pouring rain to the recycling place, my first visit. Duller than a cemetery: rows of battered dumpsters, a corrugated building with a driveup ramp and a big scale for measuring the weight of aluminum, copper, and whatnot. They pay by the pound for those metals. They'll take computers, appliances, plastics, for free. But the one thing YOU, the donator, have to pay THEM to take -- is TVs, at $20 each.

The man was good enough to bring my 50-lb., 25-inch TV out of my car for me. Sighing invisibly, because I wanted to be perceived as a good brave recycler and savior of the earth, and finding that this left me feeling very Caucasian, I began writing a $40 check, taking out my driver's license as I did so. "No need to show a driver's license," he said. "People who recycle don't write bad checks. We know that from experience."