Burning Leaves - A Meditation on Recycling

Last Sunday while burning leaves, my grand-daughter asked, “Grandpa, how old are you?”

I thought of tossing a number at her, but what would that do? At her age anything past single digits is ancient. Still the question lingered.

I needed something that spoke more of my era than my years.

“When I was as short as you,” I told her, “a gypsy came down our alley every Thursday, rumbling along in an old wood wagon pulled by a big lazy horse.”

Of course, the natural response was, “Why?”

“He collected rags and cans, I suppose you could say he did what the recycling truck does these days.”

I lost her when I mentioned recycling, she wanted to know more about the horse pulling the wagon, so we talked about that.

What I didn't tell her, and I shudder to think about it, is how all the neighborhood kids tied their Radio-Flyers to his back axle so they could ride up the hill to the end of the alley.

The other thing I avoided was how in those days – everyone recycled.

The thing is I didn't understand why until I spotted the burn-barrel behind the house we just bought. The barrel is illegal, but then this is a rural area and things like enforcing clean air rules are subject to local interpretations.

People have always burned here and they always will, but the barrel got me thinking. I suddenly knew why my parents dutifully cut both lids off of cans and squished them flat to save for recycling. They certainly were not doing it out of ecological piety. No one thought about such things in those days. The reason they bagged their cans for curbside pickup was simple - cans do not burn. If they tossed the cans into the burn-barrel, before long all they would have is a barrel full of soot-stained cans.

Still, they were diligent about recycling. They saved newspapers for the school fund-raising drive and bagged food scraps for the city garbage guys and the other stuff they set out for the gypsy rag man.

Everything else that is - but glass. Glass bottles were valuable because of the deposit. Scrap glass was another matter. Things that did not burn or were not hauled away had to be taken to the dump – in the back of the car.

One of those things was plastic. No one liked the stuff because it was so hard to get rid of and the neighbors frowned when you burned it because the smoke reeked.

Ironically, when the Clean Air Act mandated burning bans, everyone stopped recycling. It put the rag man out of business because there was no longer an incentive to separate the trash. All you had to do was dump the stuff in a bag and toss it on the curb.

Plastic and disposable packaging suddenly made sense.

Even the deposit on glass bottles became a thing of the past. The stores hated it because redeeming deposits was a pain and manufacturing new bottles was always cheaper than washing old ones.

So once everything went into the trash, it required virtue to bring recycling back.

I got to say though, I miss the burn barrel. It's the scent of burning leaves that makes this a special time of year. Whenever the breeze carries a whiff of it, a thousand memories tag along for the ride.

They were right to stop open burning in the city. There are just too many people with too much trash and even here, miles from town, I have to call the Department of Natural Resources to activate my burning permit every time I toss a match.

Still after the kids are done leaping into my piles of leaves and I stand guard over the fragrant blue column rising into my oaks, I can't help but think how fixing one thing, almost always breaks another.

© Greg Schiller, 2009
Author: Greg Schiller

Feel free to rummage around my collection of essays and stories at Greg's Garage