I buried someone's trash and recycling today.
Oh, please. It's not
like a buried a body.
You see, I have a neighbor who is … well … for lack of a
better word and to keep it clean for a change, why don't I just say
"sourpuss." She's an
incredible sourpuss. She has this irritating habit of putting her
weekly recycling and trash cans out for pick up directly in the line of access
to my driveway, and she did it again last night in anticipation of today's
trash pick-up.
Surprise, surprise, it snowed again last night and this
morning. The two to four inches originally
predicted rapidly ups to a revised prediction of four to eight and actually
ends up being about ten inches of snow. I
watch the radar (which is not a surprise), and I see there is rain, possibly
even sleet approaching. Since I'm the
lone shovel-wielder in my house, I make an executive decision to pick up the
mess before it ices over or becomes as heavy as lead.
I create a path by shuffling my feet, working my way out to
the end of the driveway, hauling my bag of trash and one full recycling bin
with me and dragging the shovel behind me.
My trash and recycling go along the street, beside the walkway, and away
from people's paths into and out of their driveways.
Not Sourpuss's trash and recycling. She has to be a …. a …. sourpuss.
Coincidentally, as if I haven't been doing this for ten
years (or however long I've lived here, I don't even remember anymore), the
snow from the end of my driveway always gets shoveled to the area that separates
her property line from mine. This is where she puts her trash. This
is where she puts her recycling. She,
who obviously sees it is snowing, puts her crap right in the way of my coveted
shoveling spot, the same spot that is (conveniently for me) slightly downhill
so it's easier to throw snow there.
Today's snow is heavy.
There's a lot of it. So I start
shoveling it where I usually do, hoping it will stay in a wet pile. As I begin building the mountain that will
block visibility, I notice that the snow is rolling down and battering the
recycle bin Sourpuss left slightly over the property line. I throw more snow. It rolls some more. Pretty soon I notice her recycling bin is
gone, buried under a large white clump.
I move further down the driveway, shoveling away, paying no
mind to anything except those errant snow blobs that keep falling off the
massive loads I am trying to toss onto Snow Mountain. I take a quick glance over the precipice and
see that I have not only made her blue bin vanish, but her trash barrel is up
to its cover in white snow. As a matter
of fact, it resembles a rotund Frosty with a flat plastic sun hat.
Then I hear it. Damn,
her front door just opened. Uh-oh.
She is marching to the end of her driveway. We have had this confrontation before, but
it's usually when the other tenants are here and yell right back at her. Last time my neighbor, who lives out front,
was so pissed off that he started throwing snow over the fence and into
Sourpuss's driveway. This time, I'm alone
out there, defenseless except for my plastic shovel and my bony little fists,
so I immediately start moving the snow the other way, tossing it up against the
front house (which is on top of a five-foot retaining wall, almost as tall as I
am). Then I start shoveling snow up my driveway instead of down, so now I have the weight of the
snow and gravity against me. If she
yells at me for burying her garbage, I will pretend I'm hearing-impaired (not
to make light of hearing impairment, but you people haven't actually met the
Sourpuss - Trust me, it's your safest defense).
In the end, I spend ninety minutes outside in the snow,
which turns to rain then back to snow, then stops for two hours before turning
the flakes back on full blast for another two hours. It's after five now, and I've yet to see or
hear the garbage truck or the recycling truck.
I am assuming that none of our trash cans nor blue bins will be emptied
today.
Good thing.
Maybe we'll get a sudden thaw and her rubbish will
reappear. Maybe she has already called
the police to file a complaint against me for burial without a proper
permit. Maybe she didn't intend to clear
her driveway at all but came outside to make me stop doing what I was doing,
what I always do, what happens every snow storm that she refuses to accept;
maybe she just wanted me to stop putting the snow along the property line.
Whatever her issue, Sourpuss never spoke a word to me, and,
if wise, never will. You see, burying
her trash is the least of offenses I could pull on her. One of her windows directly overlooks my
patio. Who knows? Maybe at my age I'll take up nude sunbathing
and really give her a heart attack.
Then someone else can do the digging. That's one burial I'm not going to have to
do.
