The Garbage Lady and Other Stories From the Trailer Park

                      

The mobile home park we moved to nearly 11 months ago is great. In fact, I think its advertising motto should be "...A Really Nice Mobile Home Park. No, Really!"

Or how about "It's Not Just Nice. It's Pleasant!"

Okay, maybe that's why I began a college degree in Marketing but never finished.

At any rate, we really are so very happy to be here. There are few, if any, areas of concern for anyone who thinks of moving here. True, the roadways are atrocious. Potholes abound (as a complement to the many speed bumps), but the speed limit is 10 mph anyway, and the few kids who live here enjoy traveling back and forth on bikes and skateboards (no sidewalks), so the bad roads serve to keep the automotive speeders under control.

It's QUIET here. We are on a flight path to the airport, and I suppose sooner or later it will become profitable for the airlines again and we'll hear that first plane take off at 6:00 every morning, the way they used to. But for now, we've got a park full of Tattoos, pointing at the sky once or twice a day, excitedly shouting "The Plane! The Plane!"

Another source of rare noise is the racetrack a few miles to the east. Or maybe it's properly called a speedway. Either way, it's not RaceTrack or SpeedWay, as in gas station/convenience stores. It's a real racetrack, with real guys driving real cars real fast, and the sound reverberates across the interstate and bounces off the tall pines, late into the night on Fridays and Saturdays when the weather is warm.

This park is over 50 years old and hosts over 250 homes. I think some of the people here are original residents, judging from the condition of their homes. They started out ambitiously, planting flowerbeds, for example, but then were not able to keep them up. Now the flowerbeds feature weeds and decorative statuary that suspiciously resembles broken barbecue grills.

But - you can't evaluate someone's home by how it looks on the outside. People can surprise you. While we were exploring our purchase options last year, we saw several such manufactured homes that were true showplaces on the inside. Custom cabinetry; beautiful hardwood floors, even a grand piano. The narrowest single-wide can be impressively expanded with a screened-in porch, or even a fully enclosed addition. Walking the park, as I try to do several times a week, I see such an amazing variety from one home to the next. Mainly, what I see are contented people. They (as do we) have exactly the abode they need, and it reflects their taste and personality. More power to all of us.

Most of the residents are middle-aged or older. Quite a few try to keep in shape the way I do: Walking. A complete circuit of the community takes me about 40 minutes. I used to walk with a friend, but she developed a spinal problem and can't do it anymore. I always tried to persuade her to walk the entire park, but she'd stick to the main streets and avoid the cul-de-sacs (there are seven). I don't get that - the cul-de-sacs are the most interesting parts! These are the places where the owners expect never to see much traffic, so they don't have to feel self-conscious with a sign reading "Parking for Rednecks Only" on their carport. That home is next to the one with the 200-year-old Chihuahua, who barks "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!" at you, then sits down to rest and growl at a passing cat, who pays zero attention.

The homes on the main drag are in much better shape, relatively speaking. They are owned by people who think there ought to be an NRA-type organization for leaf blowers. "You can take my Husqvarna 125B when you can pry it out of my cold, dead hands." They are out in front of their driveways every day without fail, as long as it isn't actively raining or snowing. Wet pavement is something they see as a direct challenge, and the glares they give you as you drive by to stir up their leaves serve as yet another incentive to slow down.

You may ask, are people friendly here? To which, I will ask you: Since when does anyone really want friendly neighbors? By the time you get to this place, you've been there, you've done that, you've made all the friends you will ever need, and you've learned how incorrigibly pesky neighbors can be. Especially the "friendly" ones. So you're content to just smile, wave and perhaps say "How ya doin'?" as you keep walking and don't stop to chat. You're here probably for the remainder of your life. If you're destined to have any sort of relationship with one or more neighbors, it will happen. No need to force it. You can get plenty of information about the other residents just by observing them.

One person I have observed, for example, is someone I call The Garbage Lady. I will get to her in a minute, but first you need to know about her comrade, the Garbage Dude.

Our trash gets picked up every Thursday. We used to put our "herbie" (as in Herbie Curby, the name they were given back in the 1970s when cities encouraged everyone to get the same big green wheeled bin so the trucks could pick it up automatically) out mid-morning Thursday because we knew the truck wouldn't make the rounds until after lunch time. But one Thursday I got up before sunrise and was sitting in my bathrobe drinking coffee, when I heard an odd noise and saw flashing lights out the window. It was our intrepid trash guy, getting a very early start. I rushed to get the Herbie out, but the driver assured me he'd taken care of it. "Yep, you better get this baby out the night b'fore, 'cause we're changin' our schedoole and you'll see us at the crack of dawn from now on! Have a blessed day!"

All righty then, we decided, and the friendly warning was reinforced by not one, but two notices to this effect by the park management. There's no website or email available with those folks; they drive up and down the streets and hand-deliver their communications by slipping notes into a little cylinder under your mailbox.  Consequently, we have called Wednesday "Trash Day I," when we go around collecting the contents of wastebaskets, loading up the Herbie and dragging it to the street.
"Trash Day II" is Thursday, when the truck shows up to collect before sunrise.

Except it doesn't. Ever since that one day, last fall, the truck has never come any earlier on Thursday than it did before. Not once. And a few times, it hasn't shown up at all on Thursday. It finally came by on Friday, so if our wastebaskets got full as we waited, we had to schlep them out to the bin that was already parked at the curb.

Another anecdote about Garbage Dude. Before the early-morning raid last year, I had occasion to talk to him. He was still observing the typical mid-afternoon pickup, and I saw him grab a bag of trash from my next-door neighbor's Herbie and drop it into ours. He saw me watching. "He ain't got that much trash," he explained, hooking a thumb in the direction of our neighbor's home. "No point in draggin' his bin all the way out when I can just use yours. And thanks, by the way, for pointin' y'all's wheels toward the road like you're s'posed to."

That made me wonder where his truck was. As if he read my mind, he said "Oh, I park way down yonder and take me a little walk around. Make sure everybody's accounted for, and I get to have me a little talk with the Lord while I do it."

Yes, that was an exact quote. Remember, this is north Georgia.

So now we know the rules:
1.  Point the wheels toward the road, because if you don't you'll go to hell;
2.  Have your trash ready to be picked up by 6:00 a.m. Thursday, even though you know the truck will never, ever come that early ... unless you don't put it out early, and then it's sure to arrive before you get out of bed, increasing your chances of eternal damnation.

Once we got that all straight in our heads, our worries were over.

Until the Garbage Lady made her appearance.

As you can probably tell by the length of my blog posts, I spend a lot of time in front of the computer. Computer is in the office, at the very front of the house, and we've got a set of sliding glass doors that look out onto the ramp, the carport, the driveway, and finally the road. It's a lovely way to observe the goings-on in the neighborhood.

That's how I became aware of Garbage Lady. It was on a Thursday afternoon, and Garbage Dude had come around to collect. Since the Herbie is lifted and upended by mechanical arms on the truck, the driver tends to set it down haphazardly as he moves on to the next property. I saw that the Herbie was upright, but its hinged lid was open. I made a mental note to get my shoes on at some point and bring the bin back to the house. My husband or I always will, usually within an hour or two of pickup.

But then I saw a woman who was probably about my age, with neat white hair, capri pants and flip-flops, strolling along in front of the house. She was familiar to me. She bent down, picked up a can or a bottle or something, came over to our Herbie and tossed it in. Then she considerately flipped the lid closed and moved on. I thought that was sort of sweet. She not only picked up litter but she prevented rain from getting into our Herbie. A good neighbor.

The following week, a similar event took place. Truck came around, emptied and set Herbie back down. Again, I was busy keeping up with icanhascheezburger.com and made a note to fetch the bin back to its accustomed spot "soon."

Well, "sooner" than that, along came Garbage Lady. This time, there was no litter pickup performance art. However, as I watched, she grabbed the handle of our Herbie, and dragged it over to the other side of the driveway. True, the truck had deposited the bin to where it sat directly behind our car, but there really was no risk that I'd get in the car and back over the Herbie. I wasn't planning to go anywhere that day.

Call me weird, but it bothered me that this woman who I know not at all, took it upon herself to move our trash bin. I told my husband about it and we brought the Herbie back to the house.

So most recently, I was keeping an eye and ear out. As soon as the truck had done its thing, on went my shoes, and out the door I went. I grabbed the Herbie and brought it safely back to its accustomed place. It gave me enormous satisfaction to thwart our over-conscientious neighbor.

So here I was, at the computer, gazing out through the double doors, and here she came. I smirked when I saw her eyes take in our empty curb and the bin sitting against the side of the house at the top of the driveway. I wondered what she would do.

She did nothing in front of our house. But she did go across the street, grab their bin and drag it back to the middle of their driveway. Then she continued on her royal way.

Ha! I thought for a moment. That'll teach her to try to move our Herbie. Envisioning her frustration, I was very pleased with my advanced level of passive-aggression.

But then, the truth dawned. Just like a modern-day B.F. Skinner, Garbage Lady had behaviorally conditioned us to move our Herbie off the street promptly, to avoid her humiliating ministrations.

Welcome to the mobile home park. Game of Thrones has nothing on this place.