wednesday is garbage day

Last night as I was laying on the grass of the dark midnight air, I could hear people, house by house, rolling their garbage cans out to the street. Some people do this at six o'clock in the evening. Many others were out between 11:30 and 1:00 a.m. checking this task off their list. Maybe this speaks to the age range of my neighborhood. Young families with a million things on their plates. A good amount of twenty-somethings. A humanities professor. One woman was talking on her cellphone. At least I assume that. But who knows, maybe there was a terribly quiet individual replying to all her chatter. 

I was transfixed by the echoing rolls of garbage bins, imagining full summer lives taking place before and after this weekly event. This sound has such a power for me. Maybe because it started in my childhood as a thing that only happened on vacation. In North Dakota where I grew up everyone fended for themselves to provide a garbage can, there were no uniform city utility bins to pick from. And there was no rolling them to the street. No, the garbage truck rolled down your alley and somehow--maybe there was a man attached to this truck--the garbage disappeared. Our garbage cans would always blow away in winter blizzards and we'd have to--that's a bit dishonest--my mother would track them down.

There's such an enormity of things going on around us, what a full engaging thing, this world. The woman on her cell phone reminded me of my mother talking on the phone to one of her sisters, sitting at the kitchen table doodling and taking notes on family happenings. I used to study her doodles and her cursive writing.

This weekend I had a conversation with a friend about seeing multitudes of people and imagining how they had lives outside of yours that carry on regardless of your place in them. It brought me back to this vignette of a film made by the professor for whom I'm working. It is one steady clip filmed on the London Underground with Professor narrating underneath about this very eternal mystery. He speaks of magnitude and of a poem by Wordsworth. Simon Lee: the Old Hunstman. My, is it a beautiful poem that I can't stop thinking about.