But first, today's plea: Aw, c'mon, Hughes Hall, I won't hurt you! Promise! So leave a note, okay? Love you!
I am married to Mr. Recycler. He loves the earth. Isn't that nice?
Years ago, when this was all just starting with him, I was cleaning out one of the kids' rooms' (they always seemed to need cleaning out, rather than cleaning up) and I must have asked him to help me carry one of the big garbage bags out to the curb. He asked what was in it. Garbage, I told him, the papers and other crap on the floor of the kids' rooms.
Hmm, paper. Instead of carrying the bag to the curb, he carried it to his "workroom" in the basement. His reason for this was that he would, one day very soon, go through the bag, recycling what could be recycled, and then he would certainly discard the rest.
It must be finely aged by now.
I don't have to learn the same lesson twice. I stopped asking him to help me carry big bags of garbage (which may have been his real plan, I don't know, but I doubt it, he isn't lazy) and I would take it out as secret garbage. These were the bags of crap (again, mostly from the girls' rooms) that I would drag out to the curb on the morning of garbage pick-up day after he'd already left for work. Smirk smirk wink wink. That took care of it. (I was later amused to find out that my friend E does the same thing.)
I discarded with impunity when there was a hurricane three years ago and the basement flooded and I just stuffed destroyed crap into bags and he just took them to the curb. So what if most of it was papers and other junk left on the basement floor by the girls since they were old enough to go down the basement steps alone? He threw it out! It was my finest hour.
Now, of course, he has a new job and he leaves for work after I do. No more secret garbage for me. I do have to bag it and tie it up myself and stuff it into a trash can outside. I hope that once it's out there he won't insist on re-sorting it for me, and so far, he hasn't.
We recycle the labels off cans and bottles. Toilet paper tubes. Junk mail, but he tears out the clear windows first.
So you can imagine what went through my mind when I had a cleaning service come in over vacation to give the kitchen and bathroom a really good going over. When they were gone, I went over to toss something into the paper-recycling bin in the kitchen and ... it was empty.
It couldn't be empty. It was the day before recycling pick-up. Where the hell had it all gone?
I looked around, and every trash basket in the house was empty, except the one under the kitchen sink. I guess they didn't see that one. But where was it all?
I looked outside in the trash barrels, but all they had in them was what I'd put there.
Hubs was working late that night; I imagined him coming home and going to put the recycling out and asking where it was, and I would truthfully say, "I just don't know."
I was telling Sibs the tale when it occurred to me: they must have put it all in the plastic and glass recycling barrel! Heavens! What could they have been thinking? Where do these people come from?
I looked outside and there it was. I pulled another bag of garbage off the top of the paper recycling bag (brown paper, of course) and put everything in its rightful place, garbage with garbage, paper to be recycled. He will, as the Little Rascals used to say, never be the wiser.
How could I take this away from him? It gives him so much pleasure.
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I'm watching no idea but I see Brad Pitt, so okay
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So ... - 12.19.2006
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Fifteen Years - 12.17.2006
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