Day 4–It Came From Someone’s Garbage, So What!

As I am so sure you can astutely tell, I got today’s item out of someone else’s garbage. Specifically someone in my very own neighborhood.

I have no shame.

Here is the item and then the story.

Our little town used to have a wonderful “Spring” tradition. At a certain time in the Spring, when your garbage day rolled around, you could put anything you wanted out on the curb for pick up. If you had a refrigerator you could put it out there. If you had remodeled the bathroom and had an old toilet to get rid of you could put it out there. And then it was every man for himself. If you saw that toilet and had a use for it then you could pick it up and take it back to your place and make a planter out of it…

Not that I would know anything about that mind you………

And so I was driving down the street, going who knows where, and there in the garbage was the wooden art table. Just waiting for me. A bit damp from having to sit out at the curb all night in the dew and the damp. Crying out to be used and not to be put out to pasture.

Screeeeeeeeeeech!

I slammed on the breaks, jumped out of the car, opened the back and stuffed the table in. Hoping all the while that none of my neighbors saw me.

And lest you think this is some anomaly on my part I have to tell you that I come from a long line of “Garbage Day Repurposers”. It is an art finely honed over years of practice. Just ask Mimi about the funeral flower arrangement baskets she scored many years ago.

For many years the table sat in the Family Room and was used as a large and rather unwieldy plant table. You can see all the water stains. And when Joyce the Stager saw it in the preparations for the sale that never happened you can just guess what she told us we needed to do with it. To the basement it was banished and there it has resided for 18 months. And I have come to realize that I haven’t missed it all that much.

And so to Volunteer’s of America it goes. Where it is hoping for another reincarnation as an art table. Or something.