Never too late!

Views: 177
Added: Tue Sep 9th 3:43pm
Posted in: Living

• » print
• » report
• » email

I found out recently that "recycling service" is built into my garbage pickup contract.  It's only been  three years since the divorce, when I got the house and the yard and all the ways of doing things that my ex had been doing them for more than two decades.  And for about two decades, his way of doing things related to garbage disposal consisted of him taking the trash down to the end of the block-long driveway every Thursday night for Friday morning pickup, and then driving eight miles each way every month or so to the municipal recycling center with vast quantities of plastic bottles and soda cans and bundles of newspapers and magazines and cardboard loaded into the van.  And cursing every step of the way.  I don't blame him, the whole process took at least a couple of hours, often more like three. 

But for the past couple of weeks I've been out walking on Friday mornings, and noticed that other folks with the same pickup service also had "recycle" bins with the logo from the same company set out on trash day.  I finally remembered to call during business hours, and behold, yes, I've been paying $3.00 a month to have my recyclables picked up and the guys will drop off a bin for me to use as soon as they can. 

I felt elated...and simultaneously like an idiot for not knowing this before.  I felt about as belatedly enlightened as I did at least a dozen years ago when--after years of being told that we didn't need a rain gutter on the garage despite my repeated suggestions--I slipped one winter day on the ice that pooled in front of the garage and fell flat on my ass.  That time I thought nothing of it but "ouch."  The second time it happened though, I sat there nursing my aching butt and looked upward.  And a mental light bulb went on, with the certainty attached that if there was a rain gutter in place diverting the snow melt, there wouldn't be a skating rink there for me to slip on. 

So the moral of the story is...it's never too late to buck tradition and figure things out for yourself.  And if you like that thought, you'd probably enjoy the essay I wrote last year, "Cordless and Dangerous", about my introduction to power tools...

www.runningwithstilettos.com