Last week Jerry read an article on how germy recyclable bags are. According to him, leafy greens are just awash in e-coli and the little bugs hop onto the inside of my bags, clinging there forever and ever, amen. Then, when I least expect it, they crawl out, hop on a piece of unsuspecting produce, ride up to the counter, hop onto the closest dinner plate and ultimately end up getting eaten by me.
It's taken me a lifetime - or at least a decade - to get my husband on board with the concept of taking bags into the grocery store. My first thought was we might backslide because of Jerry's new-found knowledge. That was not the case. Yesterday Jerry resolved the problem when he announced that he'd washed the three bags that we keep in his car. He was clearly proud of himself so to underscore his accomplishment and to keep the ball rolling in the proper direction, I said I'd wash the rest of our bags tomorrow.
Tomorrow is now today and I wonder what I could have been thinking? Like most moms, I am intimately acquainted with the view from atop Mount Washmore but that doesn't mean I enjoy the climb. For me, most of the laundry drama followed the kids out the door when they left for college. I kind of like it that way.
I collected all my grocery bags from the car, from the kitchen and from the closets. I sorted them into which ones I thought could be machine washed and those that needed hand-laundering. There were about a dozen that I threw into the washer and another ten that I needed to be more gentle with so I washed them in the sink. It was more difficult than I'd imagined and my kitchen and I were both covered with bubbles and water when I finished and took the bags outside to dry.
At first I hung them in the sunshine over the railing on our front porch. As I was cleaning up the kitchen, I realized that the railing they were draped over was bare treated lumber. That didn't sound so healthy so I moved them to the back and hung the clean bags all over the deck chairs. Luckily we face the woods, so nobody could see the hillbilly mess it made.
Every fifteen minutes or so, I am going outside and turning the bags. I move the chairs down the deck as the sun travels across the sky. Some bags dried fast, others are taking a bit longer but I do feel some satisfaction that I am wrapping up this job.
I'm happy to have this task (nearly) completed. Now all I have to do is ask myself this one question. Why does someone who professes to want to live a simple, uncluttered lifestyle even own over TWO DOZEN reusable grocery bags?
This morning while I was in the middle of executing a perfect "Y" turn to get out of my garage and head up my driveway, I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw that I'd nudged my garbage bin and it had tilted backwards. I put the car in park and as I walked over to right the bin, I realized that it's twin, the recycling bin, was missing.
My bin nudging had sent the recycling container sailing down the hill below our driveway. The garbage bin was empty but our recycling only gets collected every other week so it was overflowing. A week and a half's recycling had now fluttered down to rest on the hillside.
When I was cleaning yesterday, I dumped the shredder wastebasket into the recycling bin so there were teeny tiny strips of paper intermingled with the plastic berry containers, tin cans, bits and pieces of aluminum foil, newspapers, magazines and junk mail littered all over my backyard. It was a major mess. I would have to wade in leaves to get to the bin -- leaves that are, I might add, the same color as snakes.
Earlier in the year I made a bargain with all creepy crawly things that if they'd stay out of my area, I would stay out of theirs. This hillside was clearly not my area. It seemed wrong to welsh on an arrangement that had been working so splendidly.
What to do? Honestly, my initial impulse was to let Jerry deal with it but I immediately discounted that as being a little immature. It was high time that I put on my big-girl pants and handled this mess myself.
I broke into my secret Halloween candy stash and ate three miniature Butterfingers. Fortified by chocolaty goodness, I grabbed my jingly snake bracelets and searched the garage until I found my rubber knee boots -- these boots are not the cute kind like the girls in Charleston wear when it rains. These are brown rubber farm boots which I wear when I don't know how high whatever muck might be that I'm about to step in. I pounded them upside down on the pavement until I was satisfied that all the spiders were gone, crammed my feet in them and embarked upon my task.
It took two and a half hours for me to pick up the recyclables and drag the bin back up to my driveway. Although I was serenaded by my neighbor dog during the entire time, the only living thing I saw was a Daddy Long Legs. That's all I saw. The whole time I imagined thousands of beady eyes staring out at me from under piles and piles leaves.
If, like my husband, you've ever thought to yourself, "Chris stays at home all day. How does she spend her time?" Well, now you know. Not quite what you'd imagined, right? Me either.
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