The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down by our Garbage Free end of the island we got about 16 trucks a week from Waste Management plying our neighborhood. Big green plastic bins get rolled out to the end of the driveway and the big green trucks stop, drop their metal arms, lift the bin up and into the maw of the trucks’ rear ends then move on to the next. The mizzus asked if maybe we shouldn’t sign up for curbside pickup, save me that awful trip to the dump.

The trip I make about every 3 months. When I arrived at the primitive South End, the dump was actually that, a dump. Roll up, toss our garbage into a pit. Frank ran the dump back then and about half what we tossed he took home. Old TV’s, busted toasters, dead lawnmowers, Frank figured they were worth keeping. Sort of recycling before recycling was cool.

Admittedly there weren’t many of us living on the island back then, but when the population grew, the county installed coin-op dumpsters. For 50 cents we could load the bin and a compactor crushed it all down. A decade later they added barrels for glass and plastics and paper. We had to sort the glass — clear, green and brown — and most weeks the barrels were full so folks dropped the stuff on the ground. The dump was a dump once again.

Now we toss all the recyclables into one place. Easy. Real easy. I don’t know why either folks still use the highway to toss their bottles and cans, maybe just the irrepressible urge to dump as soon as the container is empty. But a lot of us evidently think the roadside is their personal dump. If I thought too long about it, I’d become more cynical than I already am and none of us needs that. Litter’s bad enough.

So when folks drop their garbage in the middle of the parking lot at the park I maintain, I’ve stopped sorting through it to find a letter with their address or a magazine with their name on the label. I have to live near these folks, but I sure don’t want to get to know them. I got enough enemies as it is … so I’m real glad most of the newcomers can afford curbside pickup.

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