Trash Day

Nearly every weekday, my husband calls me from work, just to shoot the breeze, since we don’t see each other much on weekdays. As we chatted this morning, I was gazing out the window at the lovely spring day. It was trash day. I then noticed the large, wheeled recycling toter at the edge of the curb. But our smaller regular trash can was nowhere to be seen. I went to another window to see it from a different angle. Still no trash can. I looked both ways up and down the road. “Dammit! Our trash can has been stolen again!” I exclaimed, after which ensued a several-minutes rant about What Is Wrong With People and What The World Is Coming To, and me considering posting something on our township’s social media page about it. Hubs remarked that that was an especially nice trash can and now we’d have to shell out another fifty bucks for another one.

Minutes later the mail truck came by, so I went out to get the mail and the recycling can. When I reached the curb, I saw that the regular trash can was sitting between the larger recycling toter and the road edge, completely hidden from view behind the large can.

Often we jump to conclusions about a situation, a problem, or a person we happen to encounter. The slow driver who stops in the middle of the road? Idiot. What is wrong with them? Maybe they’re drunk or asleep at the wheel. When we get closer we see that they have stopped to let a turtle pass safely. The client who is late without calling? How disorganized are they? They need to get it together. When they finally text, we find that their child was suddenly sick.

None of us really knows the problems hidden in another person’s life. Unless you live with someone, you have virtually no idea about their struggles… and sometimes not even then. It is so easy for us to look on the outside and see, oh, they live in a nice big house, so they never have to worry about money. She looks young and healthy; it must be nice not to have medical issues. I have found it a lifelong learning experience to try to accept things at face value without judgment, and detach myself from deciding how I would have done things differently. I try this and fail at it daily. Until the day I leave this earth, I will never be able to stop re-learning this. Let us all remember to look behind the trash cans.