The piles for Big Trash Week are growing here in Woodridge. I took a walk this morning and noticed that the Kleins’ have put out their baby wading pool (the baby is nearly 16) and the Zimmermans have put out a crib mattress. (Their baby babysat my baby.) The people two doors down with six children have put out a beat up infant car seat (their youngest is nearing two).The Morrisons, the neatest, most meticulous housekeepers on the street, have put out a single item (a water heater).

More fascinating than what people put out, however, is what people take away. All afternoon yesterday and into the evening the pickup trucks cruised our streets. Taking items this way is, actually, illegal. True, the homeowner has put the stuff out for the trash, but unless you work for Waste Management and are going about your duties, taking anything from the piles is theft. There was a big flap about this some years ago in one of the more prosperous and ritzy West Shore neighborhoods.

A few years ago we put out a television that was actually functional, but it was not cable ready (it received only channels 2 through 13), it had no remote control, and you had to jiggle the tuner dial about three times during a program to keep the signal from drifting. While Ron was hauling it out, I made a sign for it: “Works okay if you jiggle the tuner.” By the time I took the sign out, it was gone. Our dead Sony disappeared within minutes yesterday. For a while I sat in my study and watched people drive by, stop to peer at the pile, sometimes even get out and pick things up for examination. Someone took a box of toddler videotapes. They were not our favorites (those had long ago been conveyed to my stepdaughter’s children), and they’re surely unplayable (and no doubt dangerous for your apparatus) after more than ten years in our damp basement.

Lynn came up sometime after I stopped watching to report that her Fisher-Price toddler kitchen was gone. (She had clung to it the last three or four years when I was in favor of taking it to the shelter for families.) Similar equipment over at the neighbors’ was also gone. Lynn said she felt sad. I told her that this way it looked like some other child would be able to enjoy it, rather than have it go to a landfill. I was only regretful that I hadn’t put the bag of accessories that wouldn’t fit inside it closer, with a note attached.

By evening, Rosa Bonheur’s horses and Irwin the Indian were gone (but not, remarkably, Irwin’s frame). So was the birdcage, and two very shabby leather suitcases, one a Samsonite that Ron had used in college (circa 1955) and one a (formerly) snazzy red American Tourister that had been mine in the 60s. Ron drove a nail into the light pole and hung a girls’ size 8 green wool coat there. I would have brought that in if it hadn’t vanished -- it has wear for three more ten-year-olds in it.

An afghan my mother made during one of her early but futile attempts to stop smoking got taken. She’d used inferior materials and worked in the garish style of the early seventies. It wasn’t hard to let that go, and I continue to wonder why anyone else would find it attractive. Still out there this morning is probably the most useful and intact item (apart from the coat) -- a portable plastic file drawer that I had in my classroom. I even took the filed material out of it.

I have an assignment to complete for my writing class. Two weeks ago our instructor gathered some disparate items from the classroom we use, put them on a table, and told us to use them in a piece of writing. The items include an old globe (that still shows the Soviet Union and a divided Germany), a sponge, a troll doll with orange hair and a Mets uniform, a Far Side Page-A-Day calendar, a Dallas cowboys sweatshirt, and a Post-it note on which is written “costructed response?” (That “costructed” is sic, or “thus it is.”)

I’ve been resisting this assignment because I can’t think of any way to use the items except as a collection of items, and that seems so lame and uncreative. It’s the old globe, I think, that keeps me from being able to see the items as props in a story. That globe is obsolete, although if there are people who can find a use for moldy Raffi tapes, I suppose anything is possible.

I once overheard a girl in the lunch line at school say that it was Big Trash Week in South Hanover Township, and she was going to go out and scavenge for her new apartment. I knew who she was, a girl who’d had a lot of problems at home and had lived the last three months of the school year with a succession of girlfriends. We were on the eve of Big Trash Week here, and that night I went home and found among my basement collection of discards a set of dishes and some silverware, a hideous but functional lamp, the microwave oven we’d used before our kitchen remodeling, and some other assorted accouterments of suburban life. I contacted her guidance counselor and arranged to have the items conveyed to her anonymously.

I feel a character being born. Excuse me now while I go get acquainted.