How Do You Remove Your Trash?

A few years ago, my dad got sick of paying for our trash removal. One day he just showed up with a fire barrel and we’ve been burning our trash ever since. Now if we were living in town, this could be a problem… ordinances and such. Living out in the country does have its advantages sometimes. All materials that can’t be burned such as cans, metal, glass, and whatnot are stored in our out room. It’s sort of like any regular room except that it links our garage with the main house. It’s not heated or cooled so we just store things in there, including all our frozen bulk food which is kept in a freezer chest. When it gets filled up with junk we then pay for a one time dump.

So, my dad takes out the trash today for a burn and I didn’t think anything of it. I just sat down and watched a movie on Showtime. Showtime and Dish Network are allowing free viewing this weekend and Monday to promote Kristy Allie’s new show. I’m not going to watch it, but since a few other movies are on, I might as well take advantage of it. It’s not like I have anything else to do (cough, cough). Anyways, I quickly got bored and went online to check my email. Dad had already come back in and was reading through the rest of the Sunday paper. Kris, my sister was there too.

“That’s a lot of smoke.” My dad observed.

Now, the way we are positioned is on the opposite end of house facing away from the fire barrel. Or basically as far away from it as possible. That smoke traveled a good 40-50 yards, around the house, and continued out to the road.

My sis and I started getting into a stupid conversation about wind direction. I was bitching that dad should have waited until the wind was blowing out of the east. That way, the smoke would be traveling away from the house and into the open fields instead of towards us. Suddenly, dad got out of his chair. Still, Kris and I continued until she went to her room to prepare for Ms. Blossomtime crap (more on that latter.) I went back to my emailing and Dad came back in.

“Hey, Dave. Come help me put out the fire.” Before I could even ask, he shut the door to go back outside.

“Oh damn.” I said.

I went to the kitchen to see half of the backyard enveloped with a thick white smoke. Mom continued to work at the kitchen counter, seemingly not concerned with the fact that our backyard was apparently on fire. Now… you might think that this is completely messed up. I certainly did. First of all, the snow was melting today. A lot of snow was melting so the ground should have been wet. How could the back yard catch on fire?

I dashed to my room to get my pants on. Hey, even though it’s above freezing, I’m not going out there in my shorts.

“What the hell happened?” I yelled as I came through the shroud of smoke.

“Nothing. It’s managed.” Said my dad as he shoveled snow onto the fire.

I couldn’t help but laugh at the stupidity of the situation. Evidently, my Dad had placed the fire barrel too close to the bagged up leaves from fall. Something had flown out of the barrel and landed in the bags. There it burned through the plastic and got to the relatively dry leaves inside. Eventually the fire was stamped out. The backyard wasn’t in any real danger of catching fire. But imagine if this happened in August (also imagine that we still had fallen leaves then too). It could have been worse.

So lesson of the day: keep an eye out when you burn stuff or, don’t be cheap—pay someone to haul your trash away.