032/100 aka 172/365

CHANGE COMES TO WILLOWBROOK DRIVE
Word Count: 487

It is an unusual Tuesday morning in this neighborhood of town. People move along like spiders with their prey. Mrs. Smith is in her nightgown with her shell of jacket for propriety, pulling a child’s red wagon filled with cardboard she spent hours cutting to the proper size last night. Her fluffy bunny slippers shuffle down her driveway punctuated by the clunk-clunking of her cane.

Her neighbor has been up pre-dawn, dressed, the lights burning in the cellar where he wraps old dried-out paint buckets as he would a present. To disguise their hard metal edges. To sneak them in while he still has the chance. He plushes bubble wrap and papers soft around each, making sure his address labels on the magazines have been cut off. These he puts into a separate, special bag.

The morning mingles sounds of crowing roosters with rolling wheels and clinking bottles. The long black driveways come alive with sleepy people crawling crablike to the curb. Laden with their glass, their metal, and acceptably numbered plastic and their magazines and papers in unbound piles and piles. They cannot let it go another week, for next week starts July.

The decree has been made. The notice sent without much notice. This is the very last Tuesday before the new garbage rules will take effect. It took a dozen years to get used to washing out bottles. Not pour bacon grease into a soup can. It took adjustment of reading daily news online, then magazine subscriptions would be expired, and useless gizmos and broken chairs would have to hang around and talk amongst themselves and wait three months for large trash pickup day.

The new law of the land has been laid. Two barrels each per family, one blue for recyclables (all cut into even smaller parts to make them fit inside) and one green for real and sorted honest-to-God garbage. The phones at Town Hall will be ringing across the land with questions as to whether this or that is garbage and what type of garbage this garbage really is.

Meanwhile, the evil in men’s hearts are brought to surface. The most honest of us still attempt to sneak something through while we still can. Thus all this ant-like activity as the sun strains to rise about us. We scuttle back inside when we are done.

It doesn’t change with growing up. Bubble-wrapping paint cans is just as bad as breaking crayons. And you respond the same. That rapping of the heart as it beats for escape out your ears. The breath that sounds as loud as thunder waiting for the light to streak and flash like fireworks as it hits the ground. We lock our doors, peek through the weave of curtains, watch to see if we’ll be caught or if we’ll get away with it and breath a sigh of relief and resignation.