Happy Clean-Slate Day

Some people find Mondays stressful and nothing more than the signal of the beginning of a week of drudgery. Some people try to work up some mid-week enthusiasm on Wednesdays by devoting things to Hump Day--like our local radio station that features a Hump Day Party Tray contest. Be the fifth caller, and you win a lunch tray for your entire office. Some people get itchy on Friday because their work is almost done, and they can't wait for the weekend.

For me, the big day is Thursday. Thursday is Garbage Day, and it makes me feel fresh and good. On Garbage Day, I am being handed a clean slate, a fresh start, a mulligan.

My family and I spend seven days filling two, sometimes three, assorted cans by the garage with empty fruit snack boxes, chicken bones, butcher paper, salmon skin that can't go into the disposal, used cat litter that is suppose to smell like cedar but really smells like dust and ammonia and poo. Every day I pull an arm load of catalogs from the mailbox and put them straight into the can.

Once a week, some mysterious person drives by the house and tosses a local adpaper (like a newspaper but filled only with coupons for things like tire rotation and carpet cleaning which are things I don't shop for) out their car window, and it lands in the driveway. This adpaper sits there for days. It's wrapped in bright blue plastic, and even though it's small compared to the larger yards and trees and open sky, it makes the whole lot look like trash. But once I pick it up and put it in the garbage can, my yard is pure again.

A few weeks ago someone who will never fess up left the freezer door open all night long, just enough so that everything inside thawed. In the morning, I closed the door and let everything refreeze, afraid that if I threw it out so many days before Garbage Day, then it would all get stenchy in the can. So I waited. That Thursday, my husband and I each thought the other had dragged the cans to the street, and since neither of us did, we missed Garbage Day--one of the most disastrous mistakes we can make in any given week--and we had to keep the frozen-but-spoiled food stored in the freezer.

"Don't eat anything below the top shelf," I had to remind who ever put their hand on the freezer door handle.

Finally, another Garbage Day rolled around, and my freezer was purged. I was purged. My household was purged. I drove to The Store and bought another load of California Pizza Kitchen pizzas, a few more containers of Pierre's ice cream, some odd little cheese-filled pizza log things that my daughter likes. Everything was new and good.

I can clean out a closet and throw away years of accumulated trash--purged. I can empty the refrigerator of old jars of hoisin sauce, Dijon mustard, apple butter--purged. I can empty my office trash can of wasted bits of paper from failed experiments--purged.

Garbage Day offers newness. It offers the chance to start over, not just to make more trash or to feel guilty for not recycling (our trash collector claims to sort for recyclables, but I'm suspicious). It offer the chance to relish the grace the trashman brings with his dirty truck and filthy gloves. The trashman, incidentally, looks like an escaped rapist from Lucasville Prison. Even the neighbor dog is leery of him. But this pock-faced man with human flaws delivers grace, and for that, I am grateful.

It's Thursday. It's Garbage Day. And I feel clean.