August 31 - Dear Diary - Oh, The Litter!

Image Credit: Mabel Amber via Pixabay.

Today's thought is lifted from my diary.
Litter pickup was on the menu, again - once I took my recyclables and trash out and saw the ground display. It's always heartbreaking.

It’s not just the crack vials and coke and weed bags and blue smoke wrappers. It’s cups and plates and takeout containers. Gloves and masks and food. Used cotton swabs, tampon applicators, screws, nails, and a steering wheel cover. Always a flattened, fat rat or two or three.

​The more I clean it up, the more they do it. It’s starting to feel like an over the top display of hatred combined with joy of false power. It is a feeling I've felt before, if I didn't know what it was at the time.

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My mother used to do that to me with the inside of our kitchen cabinets. In particular the bottom cabinet. Two shelves held all the mixing bowls and Tupperware. Whenever I reached in for a bowl for myself, I would see complete disarray. Disarray bothers me. It makes finding what one is looking for, bothersome. Because it always felt like the right thing to do, I'd always fix it. I'd curl myself cross legged on the floor and remove all the bowls. They didn't go back in until sorted and prioritized. Priority was key. The bigger and less used items went in the back or on the lower shelf.

The next time I had to get a bowl, I’d see the same mess. I did this cupboard organizing more often for more years than I care to admit. I forced my joy of organizing to overcome my heartbreak.

If I ever said anything, and I don’t know that I did, I only said something once. The rest of the time I let myself be ignorant of how or why the contents of our cupboards were always so messed up.

Thirty-something years later it dawned on me that it was my mother and that she’d done it on purpose. Little hints about other of her behaviors with me helped me get there. She almost never left behind evidence or let anyone see what she was up to, so it wasn’t all ignorance on my part. Or maybe I didn’t want to know. It was better to just keep the cupboards nice. If I had known she was doing it on purpose, would I have kept up my Cinderella style servitude? I already know the answer to that, because it is happening again.

I have caustic neighbors that remind me of my mother. They enjoy trashing me with their gossip so that the street dealers harass me. After 25 years, this year it's actually about the trash.

I don’t think the garbage started with them sticking it to me. The pandemic seems to have been the start of the over-the-top garbage. I needed light exercise to help in my own recovery of the pandemic-related pneumonia. Cleaning the street with my grabber pole felt like the perfect solution. I meander both sides of the street and sidewalk, up and down, singing to myself. No one likes living on an ugly block filled with litter, so why not clean it up?

Then the litter shifted to on-purpose-looking instead of a pandemic side-effect. I didn’t make the connection from my youth and now until today.

You’d think I’d have an answer to the cupboard mystery of my childhood, but I don’t. Why didn’t I ask questions to find out who and why? Why didn’t I challenge them? Why didn’t I see what they were doing? Why, why, why? I suspect I understood that it would only make things worse.

But there’s another side of me that has always been there as far as I know. I wanted to be an example of what it looks like to take the high road.

After all this time, I’ve only seen one other person, once, clean up the street. She looked angry. I felt bad.

Maybe people think it’s too lowly of a chore. Below their dignity. Maybe that's why I am sometimes approached with a challenging, "Why are you doing that?"

​What could be more sacred than making something nice and clean for someone else? Did not the story of Jesus taking special, loving note of Mary washing his feet have meaning for anyone?