Thursday is trash/recycle pick-up day, so we put everything out on Wednesday night. We have 2 recycle bins because my husband drinks a lot of Diet Coke and we read a lot of newspapers, then there are the cat food cans, plastic milk bottles and other assorted bits and bobs. We learned very quickly that anything you put out on the sidewalk WILL be retrieved by someone, anyone, passing by. It has it’s up-side. We managed to give away the old leather recliner but no one wanted the kitchen table. We put it out for trash and I don’t think it lasted 20 minutes on the street – whoosh – Gone.

There is some guy who comes around on recycle day, really early in the morning, and takes all the soda cans – JUST the soda cans. Lately he has been taking the newspapers too. By the time he is finished we have two recycle bins with hardly anything in them so we go out and consolidate, leaving just one bin, before the truck comes by.

That’s the back story.

All those books I said I was going to get rid of? Well the ones that were not donate-able went into the recycle bin. Some of them were hard cover biographies published over 40 years ago. After we put them out, we had the following conversation:

Husband: “Are books recycle-able?”
Me: “They’re paper, so of course”
Husband: “Do you think someone will take them?”
Me: “Are you kidding? I don’t think the people around here know who Gertrude Stein, George Sand, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Vita Sackville-West or Queen Elizabeth I, are.”
Husband: Of course, you’re assuming they even know how to read.

Oh snap!

And yes, the guy who takes the cans and newspapers was here early; left the books and the New York Times Book Review section of the paper.

I guess books just aren’t all that popular in South Philly…