Taking out the Trash

Every time I turn around I have to toss something.  Maybe it's an envelope, a receipt from the grocery store, or the empty Starbucks cup.  Or it might be a relatively large thing that takes some ingenuity to dispose of, like a defunct vacuum cleaner or the water fountain that toppled over and crashed on the patio.  At other times, there are the things that only I seem to notice, like dust on the piano, dog hair on the bedspread, and crumbs under the toaster.

Of course, most of us regularly put out our trash each week to be picked up and hauled away, and there is usually a recycling day when we place a different bin at the curb.  And while there seems no end in sight to the things we are getting rid of, our consumer habits guarantee we will still have plenty of junk.

As I've become more aware of the dwindling number of years ahead of me, this trash problem is a nagging one.  My new home is much smaller and before I moved here, I donated carloads and truckloads of furniture and clothes, books and "treasures."  Yet I'm still longing to further reduce my possessions.  I find that it isn't simple to simplify your life.  Poring through boxes and folders is no mean endeavor.  It wearies me.  Having to read slips of paper to make sure I don't throw something important away makes my brain hurt.  This is not the way I want to spend one minute of the precious days I have. 

Growing up in the 1950s in rural Pennsylvania, we had no "waste disposal services."   It seems we didn't have much trash at all.  I walked out to the edge of a field and tossed potato peels and melon rinds.    A few times each year I would walk into the middle of a wood where there was a crater full of things disposed of over the years.  It was our own landfill. 

I think we didn't have much trash because in the 1950s, we hardly ever bought new things.  We had Shoenberger's General Store which carried whatever anyone needed in its modest building.  I remember dungarees and overalls, boots and shoes, and socks and underwear.  Mr. Shoenberger also sold basic grocery items and the Sunday paper.  Even the New York Times!

No malls to blight the rolling hills in those days.  Can you even imagine life without the shopping mall and the terrible waste of time so many of us have spent there?  No huge warehouses like Costco and no superstores like Target and Walmart.  We see all this stuff wherever we go.  When our eyes see it, our brains think, "Oh, I need that,"  or "Oh, I always wanted one of those." 

The last weeks of summer before school started, Mom began the task of lowering the hems of skirts and dresses I had worn the previous year and restitching them.  If I had grown outward as well as upward, we visited a dressmaker in the neighboring town of Brodheadsville.  A few days before school began, there would be a drive to see Norma who had a beauty salon in her home and who gave me a new haircut.  Then came the long-awaited trip to Stroudsburg to purchase school supplies and to try on dresses and skirts, jumpers and blouses, in a shop where I would parade around in front of Mom and the shop lady.  (Note: A jumper was a vested sleeveless garment worn with a blouse underneath.)  It was a glorious and exciting day, topped off with a "brown cow" at the soda fountain in Wyckoff's Department Store.  (A brown cow today is known as a root beer float.)

Over the years our home never changed its basic appearance.  For all those years of my childhood, our furniture, wall hangings, and curtains remained the same.  Mom made each room lovely in every season with arrangements of seasonal fruit and flowers and leaves.  In late winter she brought in branches from a  forsythia bush and placed them in a bucket of water for a few days, and then in a sunny deep-silled window.  Soon the hard buds would turn green, then yellow.  Soon the delicate blossoms broke forth in magnificence.  It was such a thing of beauty that to this day I can still remember gazing at it in awe. 

Note:  If you live where there is forsythia, read this link for a tip on what my mom used to do. 
http://grandpacliff.com/Plants/Forsythia-Indoors.htm

When we were experiencing the deepest, coldest winters, everyone started thinking about the gardens they would plant in springtime.  So everyone bought packets of seeds or ordered them from seed catalogs.  As a matter of fact, we students would sell seeds to raise money for the school.  It was inevitable, too, that my mother would give seeds from plants that had done well in her garden to neighbors, and of course her friends would give her seeds from their successes, as well.

We shared a lot back then.  And if anything broke, someone would always fix it.  In those days, ordinary people knew how to fix everything.  That meant we didn't have so much trash.

We did not live in a consumer nation then as we do now.  We were family, friends, and neighbors.  We treasured each other.  Material things mattered only in so far as making our home lives more meaningful and our neighbors' lives better for the long run.  We didn't think of our possessions in a transitory way.  What we purchased would last, be around for a long time, not only for us to enjoy at the moment, but also in the future, perhaps for someone who would come after us. 

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