An Intimate Relationship

I have an intimate relationship with garbage.  Always have.  When I was a boy learning about becoming a man, one of my daily chores was taking out the household garbage after supper.  It must have been a job fit to enhance masculinity since I cannot remember my sister being able to take a turn.  As a father of two daughters, there was, therefore, no one to take out the trash but me, so I continued.  It is a daily chore still done even in these years of retirement.    

However, there is one big difference in handling garbage in suburbia where there is curbside garbage pickup.  Out here in the country I take it out of the house to a collection point here on the farm and then once a week transport it to the nearby recycling center where I get to handle it a second time.  Living on a farm means no curbside pickup; instead, it is twice pickup.    One other thing different about now and back then is the garbage.  Growing up food came more directly from the garden, the pantry where summer canning was stored, or the chicken yard, the hog pen, or the cow lot.  The packaging was more like hulls for peas and shucks for corn.  

Today's lunch came in a plastic throw away bowl packaged in a square cardboard box which means there was a lot more to take to the trash can.  Every trip to take out the garbage reminds me of how we live in a throwaway culture that is accumulating a ton of waste outside our doors.  It causes some thoughts some days about the way I am a part of this society which seems to take for granted daily bread and gets careless about the ecological cost of getting it to the table.  I wonder if this is all a part of God's plan, or ours.