I've been feeling a bit sad about vacating the apartment, even more than I felt upon leaving our house of 25 years. The contrast has made me wonder whether I need more time than two months to "process" a home. Twenty-five years seems to be longer than necessary; everything in the old place seemed to have been worked through, digested, eliminated.
During our time in the apartment we haven't continued to collect vegetable matter for composting, but we have continued to recycle. The apartment complex has bins for plastic bottles, metal cans, and glass bottles and a dumpster for cardboard. I carefully segregate these items and flatten the cardboard. I don't put my collection bags into the receptacles. I don't put cereal and other non-cardboard containers into the dumpster. I've followed these practices for years (decades).
The complex has no receptacles for newspapers, glossies, or "mixed paper," but we still sort and collect them, and when I'm in the vicinity of the dumpsters near where we used to live (in Orange County, with its more aggressive recycling policy than Durham County), I've recycled them too. My three big paper-collecting bags are currently stuffed again. What am I going to do, have them moved with our furniture and packed boxes to Alamance County on Monday? But we haven't learned yet how enlightened Alamance is about recycling....Anyway, with all else that is going on this week, including going to work, I'm still concerned about recycling our paper! I admit that the thought crossed my mind this morning that I could just toss the big bags into the apartment complex's garbage dumpster and be done with it. But I don't, and won't.
It has long puzzled me why so many other recyclers aren't very careful about it. Cardboard dumpsters would hold a lot more if cardboard boxes were broken down and flattened. But week by week I've seen the dumpster overflow, with boxes in their original state on and around it. I guess people put cereal boxes into the dumpster because no bins are provided for that kind of paper. Or maybe they don't know the difference. And maybe they don't flatten the cardboard because they don't know they're supposed to (a sign on the dumpster requests it) or haven't thought about using the dumpster more efficiently.
Or maybe...they're ambivalent about recycling in the first place? Doing so is so far removed from the evolutionary history of the race, when the primary activities were gathering food and mating. Individuals recycled personal things that there was a clear advantage to recyle. The supposed advantage of taking certain things to recycling centers is "not natural." Maybe many people take their stuff to the center (because they're supposed to), but balk at doing it mindfully, with deliberation, taking the trouble to sort it properly. Maybe they're making a statement, the way I imagine certain people are making a statement when they throw their garbage along streets and roads. "I don't have to. I'm free to do what I want."
Or maybe not. Anyway, that's what I imagine. I imagine I'm making a statement myself by doing it the way I do it. I don't think I'm just acting out of habit, recycling because I've always done it, because I want to conform. I'm not a conformist. Ninety percent of Americans might "believe in God," but I deny that there is one to believe it. Blasphemy is a victimless crime. Many if not most voters vote their self-interest, but I vote what I consider the common good. No, by caring and taking trouble, I think I'm making a statement:
Life and the stuff of living are, as I used to say, holy. Holy in the "this is it" sense. This is all there is, or all that I will have. I do this in my own kind of remembrance.
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