Relative Something

Thursday evenings is the usual time when we move our garbage and recycling bins down to the road by our mailbox. Our driveway is about a quarter of a mile long, so it can be a feat that requires some preparation.

Early on, I contemplated a variety of options for managing the bins for trash day. Plenty of rural folk permanently keep their bins near the road in a designated location, and then devise ways to haul their trash down.

I don’t want our bins in plain sight all the time, and I definitely don’t want to haul trash the long distance to them.

One of our close neighbors always drives his down in his small pickup truck. I figure it would work okay to haul ours down in a trailer behind the Grizzly, if need be. We have contemplated, off and on, about the driveway becoming gravel in the future, to avoid the expense of new pavement. The bins might not roll so well over gravel.

For now, just we have for the past 3 years, we continue to walk them down every week. It might seem like quite a chore, and I’ll admit there are times when I’m not mentally prepared when that thought occurs to me, but the effort always ends up being a rewarding experience.

I can’t count the number of times when I have felt awe over taking that ‘forced-chore’ walk outside, at a time when I didn’t think I wanted to, because the experience ended up being so beautiful, fulfilling, and inspiring.

That simple action turns into an epic journey.

I have had the opportunity to spend a week learning winter survival skills at Will Steger’s homestead, to travel to see Olympic games in Norway, to hike in the Himalayan mountains in Nepal, and to experience a few weeks at Ian Rowcliffe’s Forest Garden Estate in Portugal. I returned from each of those experiences a changed man.

There is something about routinely rolling heavy bins of refuse from our house to the road that changes me, too. Every time. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure how to describe it, but I’m pretty sure it is what keeps me from putting any serious energy toward devising a more mechanized method of moving them.

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