Letter From The Other Side; by Cynthia.

Written by Elizabeth. M. Thompson.

Dear Del,
Teddy remarked one evening last week ‘It seems to be always rubbish bin night’ and by the way the days fly by I had to agree with him.

We’ve all heard of the disasters when people have inadvertently thrown away money or precious items.

One of our friends threw away an old cardboard box he thought was full of rubbish to find he had turfed out a box of all the documents and certificates of the records of his wife’s family tree which had taken her years to collect.

The air in their home was noticeably frosty for some time.

Teddy’s remark started me thinking how privileged we are to have our modern methods of waste disposal.

Each week we place our green and yellow container for rubbish which can be recycled next to the green and brown ordinary rubbish bin which then sits beside the council’s green waste bin for the garden refuse which is composted for our public gardens.

Not so many decades ago we just had the dust bin as it was called. This mixed rubbish was taken by trucks to a designated place out of town which quickly became a smelly eyesore teaming with foxes, wild cats, dogs, rats and other vermin and a thorough blot on the landscape which many towns are still trying to clean up and reclaim.

When we lived on the farm there was of course, no collection. Our nearest small town was sixty kilometres away and the largest was almost three hundred kilometres away up a highway drawn in straight line with a ruler on the map as well as the landscape.

We composted and buried what we could and once a year during winter we burnt anything combustible and the rest we took to the dump in the back of our farm ‘ute.

Sometimes getting rid of rubbish and unwanted items caused us a few problems.

One in particular sits in the back of my mind even now and taught me always to check the pockets of any garment I may be trying to swipe from Teddy’s wardrobe when he isn’t about.
Teddy has always had the habit of becoming fond of certain garments to the point where a casual observer may even suspect he has super-glued the offending piece of clothing to his back.

Trying to get him to toss something out in the rubbish is not easy. Rarely is anything worth putting in an op-shop.

He once took to a pair of jeans which he said ‘were comfortable’ and wore them continuously to do all types of mucky jobs around the farm until they became knee-less, frayed and the backside so torn it was almost indecent or only useful to some sleazy dresser for an X rated porn magazine.
They became quite a bone of contention between us.
At this time we still used a wonderful wood burning slow combustion stove which also heated our water and many a meal had been cooked by me with the help of an old shirt or a few odd socks.
I did try an old pair of boots once, but never again. I discovered leather burns at a very high temperature and these old boots burnt so fiercely the flu of the stove became red hot. The hot water boiled and rumbled in the pipes and tank and out of the overflow on the roof for quite a while. It was all a little bit scary and took a while to cool down.

One day when Teddy was in town, dressed in his town clothes, and not likely to be back for a while, I took the opportunity to dispense with the offending jeans which had been left in an untidy pile beside our bed and hurriedly stuffed them into the firebox to help cook the dinner I was making.
I placed an old but newer pair back onto the floor space where the ancient relics had been. Teddy would see them and know his comfortable ones had been taken to the place where all faithful old clothes go.
Very pleased with myself I had at last seen the last of the ragged specimens I went on with preparing the vegetables until a loud bang came from the stove.
I stopped what I was doing as a second and then a third bang shattered my self satisfied mood.
Not waiting for the fourth bang I scuttled from the kitchen and went outside while a few more explosions issued from the kitchen.
At last they stopped and I returned to what I had been doing thinking there probably wouldn’t be any need to mention to Teddy about the bangs. He would be quite upset enough his jeans had been cremated.

During lunch, when water began to seep from the stove and across the floor, I had to admit I had burnt his jeans and in my haste to see the end of them I had neglected to check the only pocket still in tact.
This last remaining pocket must have held a handful of bullets from the rifle he had been using to shoot rabbits and foxes the day before and one of the bullets or perhaps, judging by the increasing flow of the water across the room, more than one of the bullets had punctured the water jacket of the firebox.

He was quite philosophical about it all; especially as I was the one who had to make the 300 kilometres drive to the nearest town with a store which had in stock a suitable replacement water jacket.

Yes, the wonders of modern waste disposal make life much easier and far less dangerous for me although I do still check the pockets very carefully.

The loose change or ‘shrapnel’ as the boys call it goes into the grandchildren’s money boxes.

Your clean and tidy ‘flower child friend’
Cynthia.