December 18, 2008
Thursday

Readers of this space might have surmised that I haven’t been quite myself the last several days. Those on the notify list, who sometimes get brief annotations about the piece, probably knew. The item for Tuesday was little more than a picture with some explanation, and I had to send the notification three times because first I forgot the link  and then I sent the wrong one. Wednesday’s essay didn’t go up until Thursday because I couldn’t marshal the mental resources to complete it. This piece is dated Thursday, December 18, but you are not reading it before Friday, December 19, although I wrote most of it Thursday morning. In my efforts to get all my health ducks in a row so that I can keep extending the outer limit of the best ten years of my life, I underwent a short diagnostic procedure on Wednesday that tied up Tuesday as well and required general anesthesia. I felt like I was someone else living in some other world, trying to communicate from behind a muslin curtain.

But I am quite myself again. I was up at 5:00 because I’d had quite enough sleep. Our trash is collected on Thursday, something I was reminded of when I went out for the paper and saw my neighbors’ trash bags and bins in place. Ron hadn’t taken ours out, understandable in this busy week when it’s hard to keep track of what day it is. So before I sat down with my coffee I hauled out the red recycling container and one plastic bag of household trash. And let me tell you, any day on which having the physical ability to take out the trash and having the mental will to do it are regarded as blessings from God is a good day.

Our township uses Penn Waste, a York, Pennsylvania company that (some said at the time) muscled in and stole the contract three years ago from Waste Management, the company that had served us since I moved here in the 70s. When I say that the township contracts for this service, I do not mean that the township pays for it. The individual property owner pays the company directly and has no say in which hauler to use.

The first thing Penn Waste did was raise our rates and put in place lots of rules. We were strictly limited to four 32-gallon bags per week, not to exceed 50 pounds each. Extra bags, bright yellow and bearing a township OK tag, could be purchased for $4.00 each. Suddenly, shiny new red trucks (I mean, out-of-the-showroom new!) were roaming our neighborhoods on trash day, and that bag limit was strictly enforced. (Waste Management had been much more flexible, even casual, about an individual family’s aggregation of trash.) If you put out a fifth bag, even one that was really small, or tied two smaller bags together, the piece would be left behind with a little note attached telling you why it was unacceptable. Really. A note.

One time they left behind a leg that had broken off a large metal telescope stand Ron was discarding. (We are allowed one “bulk item” each week. This has taken the fun out of watching scavengers during what was once the annual Big Trash Week.) The explanation? It was no longer part of the bulk item, but a “building material,” and they don’t take building materials. (Upon Ron’s complaint, they did send a lone guy, probably an office manager, in a little white pickup truck, just before dark, to retrieve the 18-inch piece of wood.)

Now understand, we are a two-person household. We seldom generate four bags of trash a week because we don’t use a lot of over-packaged stuff, and we pack the bags pretty compactly. When my neighbor had two teenage daughters still at home, she’d sometimes bring her fifth (or sixth) bag over and put it with ours if she saw we were under the limit. Now with all the girls away and her living there alone, and two empty nests across the street, I’m not sure the four of us generate enough trash to fill two households’ limits.

Currently we pay $65 a quarter for this service, up from $55 when they started (which was a hike over the $35 we’d been paying the old hauler). When I got back from my foray to the curb this morning to put out our red recycling container (which we sometimes take two weeks to fill) and my single bag of trash, I opened the paper.

Beginning in January, Penn Waste will be upping pickup rates for all the municipalities they serve by $30 a quarter. So it will be costing us $90 every three months, $360 a year (WHAT?? That’s the first time I ever did that math!) to have our trash hauled away.

I’m going to start keeping track of just how many bags I put out each week.

And start throwing more stuff away.

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A year ago I got all sentimental in the Hallmark store.

Two years ago, I wrote about using address labels with a title I do not have, thinking no one would notice. They did.

Three years ago, I reported on my Gaudete Sunday Holiday Open House Extgravaganza.

Four years ago, I wrote about Lynn’s first Christmas homecoming from college.

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