“Lazybones, sleepin’ in the sun, how you ‘spect t’get your days work done…”

Snuck up on me ag’in…t’morra morning is trash pickup ’n it’s green waste already which meant that I hadda get some go on…I have two green cans plus two from my next door neighbor AND two from the empty house acros’t the street…

I started filling the cans last week, tho’t I’d take my time, fill a can ever’ other day or so ’n wudn’t get caught bustin’ my buns at the last minnit…ah well, procrastination is the name of the game ’n I had t’get out t’day ’n fill two cans ’n I worked up a sweat doin’ it….

At my age, it don’t take a lot of toil for me to work up a sweat, ‘specially on these warm August daze…think it has sumthin t’do with age…as a body grows older, the definition of toil seems to take on new meaning…for example, I live on top of a small hill….back in eastern Kentucky where I grew up, it wudn’t even be considered a hill at all but times change…my buddy Vic lives on the side of a Kentucky hill…his driveway has a couple two or three switchbacks ’n he ain’t even at the top…

Anyhow, I got six full cans of green stuff lined up at the curb (‘cept we don’t really have curbs on our little street~nor sidewalks or street lights) ready for the big green machine to come by ’n pick ‘em up…the county sends out two huge trucks on pickup day…one for green ’n one for reg’lar old garbage…Sacramento county, you gotta pay for garbage pickup whether you use the service or not…empty houses get billed ’n if the mortgage holder don’t pay the garbage bill, the county hangs a lien on ‘em…when we bought our first home in California, there was a private company that picked up the garbage…they had a big truck manned with a driver ’n two helpers…they’d come into your backyard, empty your garbage cans ’n never leave a mess…’n they did it for sumthin’ like $2.50 a month…costs a bit more theze daze…thanks, of course, to our progressive Democratic government…

We didn’t have garbage pickup back in Beattyville when I wuz a boy…I can’t seem to recall just what we did with our garbage…I recall, in the fall, we raked up all the leaves ’n burned ‘em…ever’body did…wudn’t really a throwaway society back then but I know there must have been sum things that constituted garbage but it just wudn’t important enuff to stand out in a boys life back in the day….

Ah well, Beattyville is durn near gone now…like eventide in Brigadoon, slowly disappearing into the mists of time...it’ud make a nice location for a riverside park ’n I expect the old Methodist Church could be headed for landmark status but maybe not…time’ll tell, I guess…

“The funny thing about time is it moves in one direction while memory moves in another.”