The snow is gone now. The bullfrogs are croaking in the swamp by the garage. Purple crocuses are pushing up from the earth, little cups of beauty in the drab, brown world. The trees are still bud-less and barren, though I’m on the lookout for new shoots. At the edge of my yard, past a tangle of brush at the edge of the swamp, sits a pile of garbage. There is a rusted out water heater, mottled and flaking; a Minnesota license plate from 1974, the year after I was born, which gives me a sort of carbon dating to the pile strewn about; a coil of rusty barbed wire, balled up like a tumbleweed; the remains of an old picket fence; broken glass, a green wine bottle half buried in the dirt, two tires, and a stack of moldering lumber.
Each spring I tell myself that I’m going to rent a dumpster and clean up the place, but for some reason I keep putting it off. The pile is out of the way and inconspicuous; you’d have to know it was there to find it. I wonder what prompted my great-aunt to discard things in the woods; she kept an immaculate garden, and planted row after row of flowers. The garbage in the woods seems inconsistent with what I’ve heard and know about her.
Some of the trash, I assume, predates the license plate, is of a time when our land was a working farm and garbage collection a city construct. The garbage, however unsightly, is in a sense a link to the past, and a link to my ancestors. It reminds me of a time when the land was worked and used, not just appreciated as an aesthetically pleasing place to sip coffee and gaze out the picture windows. Besides, would taking it to a landfill be any different? Maybe I’ll keep it here and see how long the earth takes to reclaim it all. As a reminder of our past, and our future.
1 comment:
I wonder about that too, what prompts people to just discard their things without actually getting rid of them. It seems incongruous to good land stewardship, but at the same time, such practices are what make archaeology possible!
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