Kicked to the Curb

This is one of my favorite days of the year. For the six years I’ve lived in this house I’ve anticipated Large Item Pick up like a child anticipates the Ice Cream Man.

For one week out of the municipal fiscal year the city will pick up your bulky garbage at the curb. You can haul out the broken hot water heater, the old carpet padding, the broken furniture and just place it on the curb. How cool is that? The City Sanitation Department will pick these items up from in front of your house and save you the trouble of hauling it to the dump which you never will. Well, I would because I’m not a hoarder. There are hoarders and throwers-away. I’m a thrower-away; my husband was a hoarder.

Divorce is a lot like Large Item Pick Up.

I love this day. The thing I hate about it is the sadness it evokes. The visual despair it evokes as each house spews up its vomit. Our unwanted things. They sit so forlornly waiting for the garbage trucks to suck it up and deposit it in unseen places. The sentimentality of it sometimes gets to me. You know how mystics say there is no real separation between things. It’s all energy. A table isn’t really a table, a lamp isn’t really a lamp, there’s no real distinction between you and me. It’s all just energy, molecules. George Harrison called it Maya. The distinction is just an illusion. We are our things, you are me and I am you and I am the Walrus, coo-coo-ca-choo. These were our things, prized once, imbued with our spirits, filled with utility. They were part of our routines, populated our sightline, I used to sit on that, make my coffee in that, I remember when I bought that, what was happening in my life at the time. All Velveteen Rabbits, all brought to life by love.

Dead meat brings hyenas and Large Item Pick Up brings the inevitable parade of pick up trucks combing the neighborhoods like flocks of carrion birds. They drive slowly down your street, craning out the cab window. Parking to get out and prod and examine the carcass of your refuse pile for signs of life. Foot traffic detours to poke like gulls on a littered shore.

Get out of here you scavengers!

They strew your already humiliated remains through your yard and down the road, unload your carefully loaded boxes. This is always so violating. Like someone raping your mother’s corpse.

My trash came from the basement, my husband’s domain, where entropy reigned. He left and I was left to clean up after him.

This year, it was my intention to neatly tie up my refuse in black garbage bags and line them in a tidy row in front of my house. I packed my garbage lovingly for the move in cardboard boxes, lying to it, telling my garbage it was just moving to a farm where it could run and play. It was important to me to hide my bulky items from the eyes of strangers, give it some dignity in its demise. I did not want the trash in front of my house to say anything about me to others as I listened to their trash and the tales it told. I wanted no information to leak from my heap. I did not want the scavengers to poke it and judge it and deduce anything about me. After it was deposited on the curb, I kept a protective vigil over it. The pick up trucks appeared. They slowed; I peered from my window. They examined the messy, shameless refuse piles of my neighbors. Hauling away furnaces and bookcases. Picking clean the bones of my neighbors. But leaving mine alone. Thank goodness.

What’s wrong with mine? Aren’t you the least bit curious? You don’t know what could be in those bags.

Don’t touch them!

What are you taking? You’re taking the top off that grill? How dare you! Come back here! What’s wrong with the rest of it? If you’re going to take something take the whole damn thing! You can’t just take parts and pieces. You can’t just take the good parts and leave the rest. Don’t look in those bags. Leave those boxes alone.

Where are you going? Don’t you want to know what’s inside?

So divorce, it’s a lot like that, I think.