As a child I’d spend weeks with my paternal grandmother in her house in Buckinghamshire.
Booker was in the country where the air was clean and smelled of lilac and cut hay, quite a change from the smoky, grimy air-quality of London.
We’d go for walks every day after she’d finished her chores and I would say to my father on my return home,
“Even if Nana was building a house she’d stop to go for a walk in the afternoons!” I was suitably impressed in my formative years.
I walk every day too, I take a break in the stifling humidity or bone creaking cold to go and tramp along Rigsby Lane for an hour.
My maternal grandmother lived in London and didn’t have a dustbin, as far as I could tell. She had a fire that kept the water hot, the house warm and the rubbish tamed. She’d hustle a bag of anything she couldn’t toss in the stove into my mother’s hand as we were ushered out the front door after a visit,
“Here, get rid of this, there’s a love!” she’d say. We’d drop it into a bin on a lamp-post or any number that lined the common to discourage people from littering.
When he was older my brother would see Nana plucking stray paper-bags or crushed cigarette packs from the gutter and stuffing them in her coat pocket to throw away in someone else’s dustbin!
“She looks like some old homeless person shuffling along the pavement picking up rubbish to sort through later…” he’d say.
I find I gather all the rubbish in my house once a week in readiness for our garbage collection. Then, up until the final hour (about 8am the next morning) I’m checking and re-checking all the waste-paper baskets so I can take one last bag to join the others in the bin at the bottom of our drive,
“That way I know my house will be rubbish-free at least for a few hours,” I’ll comment to no-one in particular.
Our new Mayor of Weston must’ve somehow picked up on this during our few years of acquaintance because he has put me on a special committee to keep Weston beautiful.
Until this virus came along and cleared our calendars we were slated to rally as many residents as possible, sometime in April, for a long morning of picking up litter along the roadways and parks, fields and lanes of the oldest town in Collin County!
With that activity cancelled I went on my annual-clean-up-the-lane foray and single-handedly filled a large bin-bag,
Keeping Weston Tidy!
I caught myself, the following day, checking for more carelessly discarded cans and cups and styrofoam take-away containers,
and on my way home I was stopped by a couple of friends in their truck,
“Are you delivering groceries to your neighbors now?”
I looked down at the full Kroger bag in my hand,
“Oh no! Just keeping Rigsby Lane tidy..” I replied, “but I only do it once a year…” I added lest they thought me some eccentric old biddy!
“What a good idea,” they said!
“I picked up most of it yesterday…” I explained, “I don’t do it every day…” I clarified and walked on with a wave.
Doesn’t stop me looking though and Hubs and I picked up a discarded 12 pack yesterday only to discover it had three un-opened bottles in it…
A just reward!
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