Critter kills me. He absolutely stinkin’ kills me.
We like to go for walks around the roads and country lanes near The Little Cottage, and this spring decided that we would pick up the trash (aka litter) that had accumulated so badly over the winter.
Garth and Amy Seely, of Landscape and Nature Discoveries, here in Montgomery County, Maryland, have been sponsoring trash pick up days for local school kids, and so we took a page out of their book and did the same out here on Peach Tree Road.
In the course of a few hours, Critter, Varmint, and I picked up over a dozen, 33-gallon trash bags worth of bottles and fast food bags. It was truly disgusting. Amy had wisely suggested we do this early in the spring, because in the summer and autumn, the habitat is, er, LESS friendly to having hands and arms picking through it.
It felt so good to be cleaning up our little corner of the world. But as good as we felt for doing our part, we felt equally as strongly a horrible sense of disappointment in our fellow country folk who so voluminously scattered their trash.
Don’t get me wrong, Critter bitched and moaned the whole time. He vacillated between being totally disgusted, and totally victimized. Why should HE, after all, be the one to pick up after someone else? I could only raise an eyebrow at that, for it wasn’t more than hours earlier that I had been picking up Jolly Rancher candy wrappers off the same couch his cute little pumpkin butt had just vacated.
“That’s different!” He wailed in righteous indignation. “I forget to pick them up!”
Huh. We’re going to have to find a way to jog your memory, Candy Wrapper Boy.
Fast forward two months. ONLY two months. My Captain and I were walking the same road this evening and spied:
More beer cans and pop bottles.
Strewn all over both sides of the road.
The SAME stretch of lonely road my munchkins and I had just cleaned two months earlier.
It was disheartening, I promise you.
And Amy Seeley of LAND had been totally correct….there was no way it would be easy to pluck that garbage out of the vegetation now….intermingled between the honeysuckle and Virginia creeper lay some heavy duty poison ivy, man.
“Oh yes,” I assured My Captain, “This new litter is just going to have to wait until next spring.”
“Or,” he winked, “you could just send Candy Wrapper Boy out here now to send the message, er, home.”
Nah. I’m tough, but I’m not THAT tough.
That, and we’re out of Calamine.
Mama Boe 