The Trash Lady

I see her each day. Stooping to pick up a stray candy wrapper and putting it in her bulging bag of trash. This is a busy road, 2 lanes of traffic with frazzled people zooming by in fancy cars, windows rolled up. No sidewalk or even a safe shoulder for pedestrians. So she walks in the ditch, eyes scanning, for more trash to pick up.

A few months ago she started wearing an orange safety vest, which made me feel a little better, but I still worry about her, clinging so closely to the edge of this windy road, even in the rain. In seven years, I have never seen another person walking on this road.

Again and again, I wonder about her story. This is not an “Adopt a Highway” zone. The vast area she covers surely stretches far beyond whichever weedy, gravely strip adjoins her own property.

Maybe she’s just a concerned citizen. She looks like a soccer mom. My grandpa would have done something like this-- taken a strip of earth and made it his responsibility, day after day, year after year. But he was an old man, a man of earlier times. He also amassed large balls of twine and saved tin foil. He had a vice-grip handshake and looked you straight in the eye when he spoke to you.

In today’s warp-speed culture, the trash-picking lady, who looks to be just a few years older than I am, strikes an odd cord. When I invent her story in my brain, which I have the chance to do every day as the kids and I whiz past on the way home from school, I imagine a woman who is broken, but who finds a way to put things back together by walking, and searching, and making something ugly a little bit more beautiful. I imagine her task as a gift to the world, as a prayer, a meditation, and yes, a compulsion.

Her task of cleaning will never be complete, because there’s always another beer bottle or plastic bag out there. I don’t know how long she works each day, but I have driven by 2, even 3 hours after school pick-up time and she’s still there, further down the road, leaning and picking and walking. Her daily experience seems far different from those of us who zoom by on the way to this and that.

I guess it’s a sad commentary that when I see someone doing good for the world, I imagine she must be wrestling with inner demons, something much bigger than an old newspaper caught in the branches of a tree. I imagine that she's putting something back together, with every piece of trash she picks up.

Today is the last day of school for my kids. But I know the trash lady will be there, through the heat of the summer, doing what she needs to do.

It's All in My Head

At my favorite thrift store this week I saw yet another personalized wedding gift languishing on the shelves. I doubt another John and Amber, who just happened to get married on June 20, 1994, will be searching the knick-knack aisles for just such an item.

As a result, on my weekly shopping forays I’ll be subjected to their personalized vase and my mind will weave a story about its unfortunate landing on this dusty shelf. Sure, it may have just not fit in with the decor of the happy couple, but my good sense tells me that John and Amber are now in Splitsville: broken dreams, broken promises, broken home.

I think of the future they once had, dashed. I wonder about the children, the mortgage, the house with the 2-car garage. I am protective and feel like buying it, just to get it off of the shelves and away from prying eyes.

My thrift store habit already borders on the obsessive, so if I start bringing home other people’s personalized stuff, I’ll be certifiable. But what about the plain plastic frame over there with a middle-aged couple walking down the aisle—probably a second wedding? Couldn’t whoever donated it have taken the photo out first so I wouldn’t have to wonder, all day, how neither party, no matter how badly burned by love the 2nd time around, would want to keep the picture?

I have a friend who recently bought a vintage scrapbook from a junk shop. It is probably about 60 or so years old. After extensive Internet research, she managed to track down the daughter of the family in the scrapbook. She wants to reunite her with the family album and has placed a phone call, yet unanswered, to the daughter. This friend, like me, savors the story, and sees stuff as more than stuff.

Savoring (or, in my case, imagining) the story can be a burden. It makes me think of John and Amber when I should be thinking of great thrift shop deals I can score for my family. It makes me wonder which photos, dishes and furniture I should save since I serve as my family’s unofficial historian. I want my kids to be interested in, but not bogged down by, memories of the past. Our kitchen wall is decorated with the words, “The best things in life aren’t things,”and I want to exemplify that to them.

So instead of worrying about John and Amber, and the winners of countless sports trophies and tacky business awards (“Bob Parker—January’s Top Salesman!”) that line the thrift store shelves, I will try to move on. I’ll try to remember the relief these people most likely felt from cleaning up and clearing out—and that sometimes stuff is just stuff. And, when I do finally donate some of the more sentimental “treasures” I have, I’ll try not to imagine a phone call reuniting me with my stuff a few years later.