Monday, March 17, 2008

And The Vultures Circle In Their Old Pickups

So, today is the aforementioned town-wide spring clean up. The pile Slick and I put out yesterday was rather large and took up the space of a car at the end of my driveway. It included 4 tables, 2 old desks, a bookshelf, some old kitchen stuff, an old 19" CRT computer monitor and piles of little junk. (The neighbor's 3 teenagers took the TVs.) We did this yesterday around 1pm. The vultures started circling almost immediately. Before sundown last night, all the kitchen stuff was gone. The morning when I went outside, a table & the bookshelf were gone. Every 30-40 minutes or so, the dog starts barking. That's the sign that some old pickup truck is pulled up outside my house picking through the carcass of my large pile o' crap!

Just now, I walked by the window to see a guy in greasy coveralls with a cigarette hanging loosely from his lip deposit the computer monitor into the back of an 20 year old Ford POS ranger piled high and pulling an unlicensed trailer w/ one working break-light.

Even if the actual trash hauler misses my street, 70% of the stuff is gone. I can deal with what's left if I have to. There's something about the southland in the springtime! Blooming flowers & beat-up pickup trucks circling the neighborhood just fills me with a warm feeling. Or is that my allergies?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's a good thing. Portland, ME does a similar thing in the fall... people come from other states to go trolling for "good stuff". There's a theory that nothing is ever actually thrown away during this time... everything is picked up by someone... who puts it back out in a year or two when they're tired of it. I suspect it's about thermodynamics, really.