Trashy thoughts

Summertime means grass. Grass grows and then it requires cutting. Again and again and again. My memory allows me to retreat 45 years or so to the sights, sounds and smells of home at Brookgreen. That unairconditioned house, surrounded by acres and acres of grass -- from the arboredeum between the house and the walled garden to the slightly undulating lawns around the house itself -- was home.

It was never the same one of us children who heard them first, but the cry would always be the same: "Lawnmovers coming!" Something akin to M*A*S*H's Radar (choppers) or Fantasy Island's Tattoo (da plane, da plane). From the moment of the youthful announcement, their swooping, deafening arrival seemed to be mere seconds.

These days I get to push, or drive, the lawn mower! New to our present location is a stretch of well-travelled county road. There is a difference between mowing a lawn and mowing a roadside, I'm learning. The difference? The roadside is dangerous AND the roadside requires pre-mowing attention. Unlike the operators of the DOT's tractor-powered mowers, we pick up the trash before we set blade to blade, as it were. No shredded fast-food wrappers, mangled beer cans, chopped black plastic bags here on our watch.

But ... We are responsible for a mere 100 feet of roadside, give or take a few feet. Keeping it free of trash requires daily attention. The sad truth is that every roadside is trashed. From the wide swath of interstate to the remotest route.

Now, I can type this while tisk, tisk, tisking myself into a state of disgust about all those people. The sadder truth, beyond our roadsides, is that we're ALL trashy. If you could see the loads of stuff we haul to the dump every week from this house, you would be amazed. Yes, part of it is set for recycling. But, we are typical of our society, a society that considers almost everything we own and use to be disposable. We purchase stuff we don't need, tire of it and it ends up cluttering our homes, relegated to a rented storage unit or deposited on a landfill. And we do it over and over and over, as we search for something we certainly won't find at the bottom of the shopping bags we drag home. Never ever. Promise.

Back to our roadside. There's something I wonder. The cars from which the trash is tossed. Are they clean inside?