Sometimes I think the world is divided into only two types of people. Neat freaks and slobs. Or to put it another way, those who put things back and those who just leave things where they are. Some of us change as we get older.
My mother thought I was a slob when I was in my teens, but she had yet to meet my college roommate. She was a great roommate and we had many hours of fun, but I could only take so much of her housekeeping skills. She had a habit of dropping her clothes at the end of the day on the easy chair in her bedroom. At first, there would be only one or two items and she would say “just sit on top of the clothes, it won’t hurt. I’ll wash them soon.” That soon could turn into a month… until one almost needed a ladder to climb on top of the stack to sit down. Once climbing on top of the stack became impossible, everyone sat on the floor until the laundry was finally done and one could see and use the chair for a few days,My roommates after college were not much better. I lived in a large house for a few months with three other girls, two of whom were even sloppier than my college roommate. I would get up in the morning to open jars of mayonnaise or mustard sitting on the kitchen counter. There would be shoes and items of clothing dropped all over the house. One day, when I was going to have visitors, I took everything I could find laying around and threw it all up on the stairs landing. The pile was so thick that they couldn’t climb the stairs to go to bed. They thought I was over-reacting, but the house was tidy for a few hours.
It would be fine if our sloppiness was limited to own houses, garages or storage sheds, but it is spilling out into the neighborhoods, into our parks and public spaces, onto our sidewalks.
We just got back from Italy and one of the most amazing things we noticed was how almost litter free it was. I saw one plastic bottle floating in the Grand Canal in Venice…only one. There were a lot of people walking their dogs, but they were all picking up the poop left behind. Of course, their lifestyle doesn’t create as much room for leaving rubbish behind as ours. They drink their espresso in a small china cup, while standing up at the bar in the bakery or coffee shop and wine, their drink of choice, is not the same carried around in a plastic cup. It is meant to be enjoyed sitting in a cafe while having dinner with friends. They do not get a “Big Gulp” to go that will be carried around and dumped somewhere.
There were public trashcans on residential streets and they were used. We observed one interesting thing in Rome. At a lot of the fountains and public monuments, there were trash cans that consisted of a circular metal frame to which they would attach a clear plastic trash bag. It served two purposes: it was obvious to look at it that it was for trash and it was very easy to collect the trash and insert a new bag. It was not difficult to recognize that you were supposed to deposit your trash. I would much rather look at a pile of litter collected in a trash bag as opposed to watching it swirling around and getting trapped in trees or in the gutters as so often is the case here in the United States.
My husband and I used to take a trash bag with us in the morning when we walked the dogs. Sometimes, especially after an event like Halloween, we would collect an entire trash bag full of litter. Then there is the litter that you cannot pick up, couches, broken plastic toys, car parts, bicycles and left-over pesticides. If we don’t pick it up it will eventually make its way into our streams and rivers and from there to one of the world’s oceans where the pollution is spreading at an alarming rate.
We can’t wait for someone else to pick it up and put it away. It is the responsibility of each of us to make sure that we are taking care of this planet. We have to pick up after ourselves.