Canadian Chronicles: Family Feud Garbage and Recycling Style

Garbage is monitored in a police type state in this sector of cottage country. The local dump is filling up, and it is all about policing our own garbage and recycling if we want to keep it open.

This is garbage up close and personal. In the city, we fill our garbage cans and roll them out to the corner. The very nice garbage men come along in their truck and presto change-o, gone-o.

Two months a year, I really think my money that is paid to Marin Sanitary is quite a bargain—ever with the new rate hikes. There is a sterility and detachment that is akin to buying bologna in the supermarket.

Sometimes we think about where our garbage goes, but there is nothing like seeing a mama bear eating it with her babies. When that big momma is eating your leftovers, how can you not contemplate what your leftovers are.

On the abyss of the pit, there is very little that is poetic. Pieces of trash and more trash co-mingle in a tangle of stinky, smelly mess. Where do old toasters go to die? Just look in the hole of the garbage dump.

Maybe if were all confronted with actually putting our own garbage bags in our cars and driving them to the dump and then adding them to a cesspool of crap, we would all be recycling more vigilantly.

My son is pretty good about being in charge of the trash and recycling. That was, until some fellow Americans visited us, and 2 weeks later, when we were getting ready to take the recycling and the garbage to the dump, or a dump run as we call it, we realized, that our relatives are not very good recyclers.

Yes, old moldy orange peels, diapers and meat wrappers co-habitated with the cans, paper, plastic and glass.

Somebody had to sort it, posthumously, so to say. As the main working mama at the B&B we call the TAJ, I was stepping back from that one. All of the kids tried to pass that one on, but my eldest daughter was the worst. She was adamant that SHE was NOT sorting stinky, rotting garbage.

I told her we all have to do jobs that we’d rather not do and that is it is part of life. Not very impressed with my little speech, she resisted royally or princessly. Let the feud begin.