Junk Mail

Went out to pick up some trash out of the ditch where our gravel driveway reaches the hard road. Thought it would only take about 15 minutes, but spent almost three hour at the task. I had a plastic bag and filled it up real quick, then found two more bags in the bed of my pickup and eventually filled both of them up too.

Wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. Turned out that dragging the plastic bags through the ditch didn't work very well, mainly because it wasn't really a ditch. Actually, it was just a steep grassy wall that fell off the road into the woods. The bags snagged, and so did I, and I realized I would have to develop some kind of a trash-pickup-protocol for doing this. At first I tried leaving the bag and tossing the stuff in its direction. But when that didn't work I realized I would have to throw everything I found up on the right-of-way of the hard road, so I could pick it all up later. That seemed to work pretty good.

So I was stumblin through the buckberry branches, and the twisty Laurel limbs and a lot of Rhododendron arms and legs and knees. I tried to not step on the flowers -Windflowers had just come up, and there were a lot of Spring Beauties, and amazing violets - brilliant blue ones and bright purple ones, and gigantic white violets, all this poking up through the Milwaukee's Bests, the Icehouses, Steel Calibers, Busch Lights, and a lot of Mountain Dews. Even found one Budweiser - must be a republican tossed that one. Found a pair of old sneakers, 4 hanging pot plants, a lot of disposable diaper things - guess those had mostly disposed - some paint cans, lots of cigarette stuff and a whole lot of Kentucky Fried Chicken remnants.

At last I was through. I staggered back to the truck to get the other two bags and was just coming back past my mailbox when I heard a Jeep coming up the hard road. It was our mailman.

Billy pulled up on the right side of the road, sitting on the right side of his Jeep, with his eyes rolling around at all the trash.

"Whut happen heer?" He grinned as he held out a couple of letters to me.

"Didn't you hear about the accident?" I asked him.

"Man, I doan heer nuthin' bout innythang when I'm out here - whut happen?"

"A mail truck turned over." I said.

Billy looked back over his shoulder al all the trash on the side of the road. "Where is th'truck?"

I told him pretty matter-of-factly, "Oh they hauled it away."

"Is the driver OK?"

"Yeah, he's fine, he's gone to get a bandage on, I'm cleaning up for the Post Office."

Billy looked at me "Wheres the Post Office people?"

"They're at work, back at the office. No big deal they said - it was a junk mail truck."

Billy looked back at the trash, then at me. "You spoofin me." He said sofly, with a question mark floating in afterwards trying to find its proper place.

"It's a fact." I said confidently.

"OK, see you later." Billy put his Jeep in gear and pulled up the road to the next mailbox.

I bagged my trophies and went home.

© John Womack, 2007. All rights reserved.