A Trash Story

 

 This is an old picture, because a) this is our truck DH hit the deer with and it is not broken in this picture, and b) there's no leaves on the trees.  It's actually from late fall, if I do remember right.  Anyway it was a while ago.

It shows a bunch of junk in the bed of the pickup.  That is not our junk.  It is junk--likely a countertop and cabinet from someone's remodel--that lay smashed on the shoulder of the road at the intersection where our road meets the main road about a half mile north of this little place here.  Don't know whose junk it is; one day I drove to that intersection on my way somewhere else and saw it.  I assumed someone had been hauling junk in a trailer and this bounced off and smashed on the edge of the road. 

A week later, it was still there.  The owner had not come and cleaned it up.  Did they know?  Well, if I had a trailer full of big things, like a cabinet and a countertop are, I definitely would notice when I got to my destination that one was missing.  I would probably retrace my steps and try to find it.  This person, apparently not.

Two weeks later, yep, still there.  Not only hadn't the owner cleaned it up, neither had anyone else.  A large pile of busted wood, some of which was laminated on one side, and a smashed concrete countertop with sparkly pieces in it.  Plus some metal drawer rails.

It didn't make it to three weeks blocking the shoulder of the road.  Neither DH nor I could stand driving by it any more.  One evening we took our truck down there and cleaned it all up.  We hauled home all the junk somebody else had left there. 

The busted concrete countertop ended up spread out in a low spot on our woods road that often floods and bogs down in the Spring.  It raised that up several inches and also provides tractrion for tractor and four-wheeler tires (although not for horse hooves; I wish DH would add a few inches of dirt on top).

The metal drawer rails went into our scrap metal bin.  The wood  was either burned (if it was a piece without a laminated side) or put into our trash bin if it was laminated.

Not a difficult task to dispose of at all.  Why it had to sit there for so long, I don't know.  It's not like we're the only traffic that drives through that intersection and saw it for days and days and days.

Even more irritating is the fact that for the first week, the county road commission had a "road work ahead" sign almost right next to this pile of broken crap.  They removed their sign, but left the junk right on the shoulder of the road where it lay.  I would have thought the road shoulder was their jurisdiction, not mine (who lives half mile down the road).  Apparently not.

Now I feel like an old fogey saying "What is this world coming to?!?" and shaking my head about the general lack of care about things.