The Georgia Piedmont is full of interesting plants and animals. But today is trash day. If you are walking through the neighborhood, what you see is waste.
Every household, including ours, puts a big bin — I’d guess 50 gallons — of garbage on the curb. It’s a symptom that something is horribly wrong with our economy.
My grandparents were among the last of the small farmers. When I got to college, I heard the phrase “subsistence farm,” a term that gets to the disadvantages of the business and the way of life it supports.
But when the economy is based on a household, rather than on something much larger, there’s remarkably little waste. Almost everything on that farm that wore out was reused before it went to the dump.
A canning jar, cracked but not broken, was relegated from the kitchen to the barn as a container for nuts and bolts. When the jar finally broke, the shards went into a trash bin, which had once been a 55-gallon oil drum. The drum was about the same size as the bins my neighbors and I put on the curb.
We do it once a week. My grandfather filled his bin two or three times a year.
He had a different way of thinking about waste.
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