Trash Can Philosophy

As I carried the white draw-string kitchen trash bag out to recycling, it was bursting with green bottles, blue aluminum cans, and red cups. This got me thinking about the holiday season that had just ended with a New Year's Eve party hosted at our house by my son and a few of my daughters' friends. The colors of the season were well represented in my recycling bin.

Trash Day the week after holidays past have been filled with the cardboard boxes that contained Little Tykes furniture, train sets, various wheeled vehicles, and complex Lego structures. Before that it was boxes from porta-cribs and baby swings. Times have certainly changed. No more Candyland or Monopoly. The games the kids play now involve money and more often than not some sort of alcoholic beverage. No more assembling bicycles into the early hours of Christmas morning, being woken up precious few hours later by little bodies slamming onto the bed just as the sky is turning a paler shade of gray. This is the first Christmas morning that we actually had to wake our kids up. We were sitting at the kitchen table until after 10:00 a.m., so we called upstairs, texted, phoned, and finally got a groggy response from one or another, then a shocked "I can't believe we slept so late!" from my oldest daughter. We barely had time to open gifts before I had to put the turkey in the oven and start chopping and browning and mixing for Christmas dinner.

A week later my trash cans were overflowing with the afore-mentioned bottles large and small, tall and wide, of every color they come in. We all know that a person's trash can reveal many secrets (thank you CSI), but for us it tells the story of time marching on.