Dumpster Diver

Hoarders and Hoarding Buried Alive are two shows that I can't help stopping at when channel surfing. I don't watch commercials at all. From channel to channel is how I watch TV. I am sure that is how I am a little familiar with just about every reality show there is. I still say that it is crazy how Frank and Mike on Pickers thinks that people having gobs of junk are so special and the Hoarders shows are all about re-hab for them. We were going to eat Monday night  downtown Wednesday night. Parking in Downtown Florence means circling the block a couple of times. For sure when My wants to park right in front of the place we are going. We went past and around behind Rigatoni's; cutting thru the alley behind. We both noticed that the dumpster was over flowing. Looking closer there were two shoes; one a boot and one a mans shoe sitting on the edge of the dumpster. With an even closer look there was someone in the dumpster. He was the one that had thrown the contents of the dumpster into the alley. This is one of the things that I rate as crazy things you just don't see everyday in Florence. Here he was a for-real-life-dumpster-diver in my town. I am always imagining the rest of the story. I wondered was he looking for the mates to the boot and man's shoe; then if he needed shoes? He could have been in that dumpster barefooted. Another thing that crossed my mind was what else he had found; if anything. Was he a hoarder or homeless? I will never know for sure but seeing him made me wonder all about the man inside the dumpster. That is also a thing that can be really dangerous. His head was visible so hopefully he would not get dumped into a garbage truck. Seeing this I remembered the dumping spots around us when we were kids.
When we were growing up, before the Lexington Dump opened most of the garbage that was disposed of around us was dumped at the edge of dirt roads. The Lexington Dump was also at one time famous for UFO landings. At one time people were coming from miles checking out the rumors that there had been flying saucers landing at the dump. This craze lasted a summer and fizzed out. The UFOs either quit landing or people just stopped believing. There was a spot just before you get to where the Lexington Dump was put. It was on the right side of the road going towards Lexington. Someone Else's junk was a treasure to me then. I was guilty stopping my bike to see what had been thrown away. Specifics of what I found there have left me now, but there was Estes Graig's for real dump. He had an old garbage truck and had the monopoly on garbage pick-up in the Newton Town-Whitehead-Kingtown area. When my daddy found out we were going exploring in Estes's dump he was not happy. This was one of the few places he forbid us to go. Forbidding the four of us to do anything did not work sometimes. That dump and skating on the ponds when they froze in winter were the main things he did not want us to do. This was way to much fun to quit doing. There was treasure to find in those mountains of trash. Toy cars and trucks were something we could always use. We had the dirt floor in the car shed covered with roads we scraped with a garden hoe. A garden hoe made the perfect width to drive a toy car on. There was also things in the dump for us to make barns and houses to set along side the hoe scraped roads. I even found metal toy camper that made a perfect mobile home to use for one of our homes beside the roads we made with the garden hoe. A green kitchen rug was the yard that I sat the toy camper on. Then I would pick crepe myrtles to make bushes around my make-believe homestead. One of my greatest treasures I found was a ceramic rooster/planter. I am positive now that it was Shawnee or Hull. It got misplaced over the years, but now I search for it on Etsy every now and then. I am yet to find one like it. The very last time that I slipped off to hunt for stuff I was caught by daddy. I had just gotten off the dirt road that met the Betty Ann Highway when my daddy came up the road in his white Plymouth. I knew I was busted. I had a couple of things that I had found in the dump and not enough time to throw them in the ditch. He knew by where I was and what I had that I had been where he had told me not to go. He followed me on my bike to the house, totally mad at me. This as one of the worst whoppings I had ever got in my life. He really believed that we could get cut or fall digging in that dump. He was right and I deserved the whooping he gave me. The for real dump was put in, taking the temptation away, because Estes had to quit putting garbage on his property. It is crazy the things we did to entertain us when we were little. Most kids today wouldn't get close to a dump. Most girls would have not back then, but I did have to hang with three boys most of the time. Most of the time when I was dump diving I was gathering stuff for the boys, to make them be nice to me. I am guilty of Gathering Life from a Landfill.

"The wonderful thing about storytelling is you don't have to be perfect," ~~Katherine Tucker Windham